OUTDOOR LIFE
It was not a house or church, or wood or field, here or there, that
swarmed with reminiscences of my life half-a-century ago; every bit of
Norfolk soil that I passed over or looked upon was thick with history of
the old times. I had been so sure that the March of Progress, which in
the same period had made a highly modern nation out of nothing on the
other side of the world, would have swept away the wild-blooming
hedgerows, the divisions of the little fields, the rutty, grassy,
tree-shaded lanes, the old fashions, generally, of my native county; and
I could hardly believe in the luck which had spared so much that the
little taken was scarcely missed. Some thirty years ago an Australian
friend of mine made a long-desired pilgrimage to the home and graves of
the Brontës, and blessed his fate in having chanced upon the last day
before the church at Haworth, as Charlotte and Emily had used it, was
closed for restoration. I was just too late for Crosby Hall, and the
house of the H. family near T---- was gone; otherwise I had no
disappointments in my search for the ancient landmarks. But that England
was so beautifully well kept (and perhaps it was so then, although I did
not notice it), it was the same England that I had left, and no part so
unchanged as the part of Norfolk I returned to, which I called my own.
Driving about with M., I lived my old outdoor life again, as if there
had been no break in it.
That there was any outdoor life at all in those benighted times I have
heard questioned and denied in various ways by our athletic offspring.
"Oh, what did people do before there were tennis and croquet and golf?"
Contemporary writers are fond of drawing comparisons--I have done it
myself--between the lady of old, with her prunella shoes and her swoons
and her genteel incapability, and the stalwart, active, efficient damsel
who now fills her place; wholly, of course, to the advantage of the
latter. But, looking back, and trying to be strictly fair all round, I
am not sure that the women of the fifties were so much less sensible
(according to their lesser lights) than their descendants of to-day. It
must be remembered that they could not be more sensible than fashion
permitted, and that we are just as craven slaves to that impersonal
tyrant as they were. I am sure that if fashion were suddenly to forbid
tennis and croquet and golf and the rest, those invigorating pursuits
would be abandoned to-morrow. You will say that our enlightened views
upon physical culture would remain, to operate in other directions; and
one must admit that in the fifties physical culture was unknown. There
was no sanitation, no philosophy of food, no anything. Yet folks lived,
and to a good old age too. They had one thing that we have not--the
tranquil mind--than which there is no better foundation on which to
build bodily health. We do not want their tranquil mind--certainly
not--but that is beside the question.
In the fifties, although golf and tennis were not games for the
multitude, bowls and cricket were as dear to the bewhiskered public as
now to the clean-shaven or moustached; and women had their lawn
diversions for the hours they considered enough to give to them, the
balance of their active exercise being put into housework and "duties"
generally. There was a primitive sort of lacrosse that we were addicted
to, and archery, which was a graceful and quite scientific game. We had
a small armoury of bows and arrows, bought cheap at the sale of the
furniture of a neighbouring great house, and gave social entertainments
on the strength of it while we lived at D----. Women with good figures
showed to great advantage before the target, and eye and hand had to be
as well trained for the bull's-eye as for the hoop or hole. It is true
that archery was for the privileged well-to-do; an archery meeting
usually had the background of a green and well-kept park. This rather
disqualifies it for the purposes of comparison with our modern outdoor
games. But those who did not have it did not miss it. There were nutting
and blackberrying and mushrooming and May-daying--plenty of simple
merrymakings--within reach of all.
On May mornings--oh, I wish I could have had an English May once
more!--we were up with the birds and out in the fields to hunt for the
first hawthorn bloom. It was one of the settled customs of the family,
if not of the community. Often the morning was terribly cold, mostly the
grass was reeking wet, but still the expedition was looked forward to
with joy and carried through in the highest spirits. Blackthorn it was,
if we found it at all, but it was not our fault if we did not return
with some trophy of green bud or white flower to lay upon the
breakfast-table. Later in the morning the village girls came round with
their May garlands. A structure of crossed hoops of wood thickly
wreathed with evergreens and artificial flowers, with a doll in the
middle and any procurable odds and ends of ribbon, tinsel, or other
finery, hung about it, fairly describes the sort of thing. Two girls
carried it between them on a pole, and it was covered from view under a
cloth until presented at your house door; the cloth was then whipped
off, you gazed admiringly and, if generously disposed, or there were not
too many of them, dropped a copper into an expectant hand or bag.
At any rate it was quite understood to be the right thing to take the
air. We children were sent out in all weathers for our daily walk. I
vividly remember crying with the cold, again and again, as I trudged
along the snowy roads and through the bitter winds of those hard winters
that used to be. Yet it was a wholesome practice, and we were wisely
safeguarded against its risks, except in the matter of headgear, the
close fit of which made our ears tender so that we suffered horribly
from ear-ache, a malady unknown to the open-hatted head. On how many a
night we wailed in sleep, or sobbed in our mother's arms by the
fireside, with a roasted onion and a hot flannel pressed to the pain
which they could not alleviate; and nobody knew the reason why.
When we went out in snow-time we wore snow-boots. They were woolly and
waterproof, very thick, and were laced or buttoned over our other boots.
For wet weather we had clogs--wooden soles with leather toe-caps and
ankle-straps; the soles were cut with supports like the arched piers of
a bridge, that lifted them an inch or two from the ground. Our elders,
and especially the working women, used pattens--wooden soles again, but
raised upon an iron frame and ring, and with one fixed strap which took
the foot at the instep when it was thrust through. One could not imagine
the rural housewife and her maids flushing their brick floors and wading
through the "muck" of their farmyards without their pattens on, nor
imagine another contrivance that would have answered the purpose better.
Cheap, durable, put on and off in a moment, and needing no attention,
they were most convenient to the wearers, and their effectiveness in
keeping the feet dry and petticoats undrabbled must have made for health
and cleanliness. Yet I suppose there are no clogs and pattens
nowadays--I saw none; and, if so, it seems rather a pity. Things that
have been improved upon ought to go, but why abandon those that still
remain desirable? What is there to take the place of clogs and pattens
in usefulness to the class which once wore them? Not goloshes, surely.
They were not the only sensible footgear of these days either. When the
eldest aunt visited us she used to bring our supply of nursery shoes, in
which five children scampering about the floors made less noise than one
does now. Those shoes were woven of narrow strips of cloth in a flat
basket pattern, sole and upper in one, like deerskin moccasins, and as
soft; some old man in her village made them to the eldest aunt's order.
But it may be that he was the sole manufacturer, whose art died with
him, for I never saw their like elsewhere.
We drove as well as walked abroad. Ladies with carriages used them
regularly of an afternoon, having paced their garden terraces--skirts
held well above the hems of their snowy petticoats--earlier in the day.
Mother and I had many outings together in the gig; either to L----,
to do shopping, or to her father's house at twice the distance
away. And she did not attempt to drive with one hand and hold up an
umbrella with the other; indeed, she could not have done it, for the
"gig-umbrella"--green cotton with a bulbous yellow handle--took a man's
arm to support it. When it rained she drew a mackintosh hood from the
box that was the gig seat and tied it over her bonnet, shutting
everything in with a drawing-string round the face; there was also a
curtain to it for the protection of neck and shoulders. Now, was not
that a sensible idea? But we never wear on wet journeys a mackintosh
hood or something better than a mackintosh hood, even in the dark when
there is nobody to see us.
For driving in the sun she had another device. That father called it her
"ugly" indicates that it was for comfort rather than adornment; yet I do
not see why it particularly deserved that name, comparing it with the
many things we wore--and wear--that cannot be termed beautiful. A length
of soft silk, blue, green or brown, equal to the circumference of the
bonnet-brim, was run through with three or four flexible ribs, cane or
whalebone or steel springs. The ends of silk and ribs were drawn
together and strings sewn to them; and when the article was put on it
made a sun-shield for the eyes like a window-awning. I had a little one
too. It clasped my little bonnet with a spring; and side by side we
drove through the summer glare, sitting at ease with hands free, under a
shelter better than that of the mushroom hat of a few years later. If,
as I hold, the first principle of beauty is suitability, the "ugly" was
not ugly, and it deserved to live. How much it might have added to the
pleasure of my long Bush journeys, and detracted from the fatigue!
The memory of those drives with my mother is amongst the sweetest of my
youth. I was a very little child then, yet we were perfect companions.
All the way there and back we talked and talked, and never bored each
other. I never knew her to "shut me up" or put me off with evasive or
impatient answers. Once when she was ill and we were all bothering her
at once, she exclaimed, "Oh, who would be a mother!" The words not only
cut me to the heart as I heard them, but I never forgot they had been
spoken; nor did she, and I do not think she forgave herself for them. It
was the only instance I remember of her complaining under her burdens,
which were so heavy for her strength, and especially of the cares of
motherhood. Even the youngest aunt used to liken her to the fabled
pelican that fed its young with its own blood. She had no life that was
not lived for others, and first of all for us.
No doubt she was over-soft of heart where her darlings were concerned.
For instance when we went shopping to L---- we always lunched at a
certain pastrycook's, in a little alcove off the shop, and on the ground
that it was a holiday outing I was given my choice from the bill of
fare. Mother did earnestly advise me to _begin_ with a savoury, as she
did, but there was no compulsion in the matter, and I think I made my
whole meal of sweet pastry every time. What delicious three-cornered
tarts those were!
And, a year ago, I was in L----, and I looked for that pastrycook's
shop--and found it!
But the intellectual pleasures of the road rivalled the material joys of
the restaurant. She used to tell me stories of the places we passed,
grown-up stories, and not the faked stuff that children are so commonly
befooled with. I always knew at the time that I could trust every
word she said, and when I grew up I never had to learn that she had
deceived me. Even our frequent babies were not found under gooseberry
bushes or brought in the doctor's pocket; that "God sent them," and
that I should "know more about it some day" was her account of the
phenomenon--puzzling, of course, but less so than the monstrous and
conflicting statements of monthly nurse and servants. When the eighth
(there being two more still to follow) was on the way, I was privately
informed beforehand. "Our secret," mother called it; and while she made
its earthly garments under my eye, we spent blissful hours building
air-castles for its habitation, in the strictest confidence.
On our way to her father's house we passed a dark, still pool, sunk
within precipitous walls of earth that looked as if they might have been
those of an excavated quarry--a most fascinating spot. The Bride's Pool,
it was called. Once upon a time, she told me, a bride and bridegroom
were driving from church after their wedding and a great storm came on.
The horses took fright at the thunder and lightning, and backed the
carriage off the road and over the bank into the water-hole, and the
bridal pair were drowned. The details of the tragedy lived in my mind
for ever--how they loved each other, how their new home was waiting for
them and they never entered it, how they were fished up together,
clasped tight in each other's arms. Then there was the Heath (M. drove
me to the edge of it, behind her own old fat pony), the furzy, lonely,
wind-swept waste where the rabbits lived, a shuddery place that we liked
to be well past before dark. For there was a time when a gibbet stood
there, and skeleton men hung on it in an iron frame that creaked and
clanked in the windy nights. She did not mind harrowing my infant soul
with fore-knowledge of the world's agonies, and I do not know that she
was wrong. It must have been an extreme devotion to my good that caused
her to leave me behind with my grandparents and return the long way
alone, as she often did.
If I was spoiled at home I was doubly spoiled with them. Even the stern
grandfather gave me his gold seals and his historic snuff-box to play
with. There was a wondrous scent, compounded of pot-pourri (in the room
with the cabinets of china), lavender (in the linen press and drawers),
heliotrope (beneath the windows), and something sweeter but
indescribable (in grandmother's store-room), which differentiated that
house from every other that I have known. I longed to see it again when
I was actually on the road to it, but we were not out with Mr B. and his
strong horse this time, and M.'s pony was too old and too petted to
toddle any farther than the edge of the Heath.
To this day the smell of "cherry-pie," one element only, reminds me of
the place and nothing else. It was a sweet place indeed when the
youngest aunt was away from it--the eldest aunt mothered motherless
cousins elsewhere--and I am happy now to have been there, if I was not
quite happy at the time. I ought to have been happy, with such petting
and such surroundings, but I do remember that I was homesick. The
beautiful lawn, sloping from the house to the road, ended on the top of
a stone wall, and I was told not to stray so far, lest I should tumble
over; but secretly I strayed there often, to look along the road for a
gig and a white horse. That was the great day--when mother arrived to
fetch me home.
Dear old home, that to all appearances had not changed a bit! Dear old
barn, with its warm, mealy, delicious odours, and its statuesque owl on
the dark rafter overhead--outwardly the same as ever. Why, here again we
had no end of invigorating sport and active exercise. Hard work was done
there and few amusements were more amusing than to watch it a-doing,
sitting well out of the way on an upturned "skep" or a pile of empty
sacks. I have seen men using the flail on wheat and barley like bush
fire-fighters beating out flames; and I have seen a sort of windlass
thing with horses turning spokes and a man and whip in the middle,
operating outside the barn a simple mechanism within, the first
improvement upon the flail; but I also remember, even at T----, the hum
of the tall-chimneyed travelling engine that performed all its duty in
the fields, herald of the modern method, so wonderful and admirable, yet
apparently so devoid of attraction for a child. There was rat-catching
in that barn--the most fascinating of amusements. Little girls managed
to slip in with little boys when friendly servants summoned them to the
fray. A professional rat-catcher attended. Oh, the thrilling moment when
he unslung the box from his back and allowed us to look at his ferrets,
writhing together in the straw like eels. And when his assistants, with
their sticks and dogs, were marshalled at their posts, and the sinuous,
sleek bodies were sent down the holes, the breathless waiting for
smothered squeaks below, for the dramatic bolt of rats into the
open--poor things whose point of view was no more considered than was
that of table fowls and calves (the former used to be killed horribly by
having knives thrust down their throats, being then left to hang head
downwards and bleed until life was drained out of them; and the latter
were bled to death also, although not with such monstrous cruelty, the
object in both cases being to have flesh white for table; and we, so
tender-hearted for our pets, could watch the callous executioner and the
long agony he inflicted)--I do not know a more enjoyable sport for those
who have not developed the idea that dumb things feel as we do. At other
times the owls in the barn roof hunted the rats and mice. I have seen
their eyes in the dark, and the ghostly passing of their uncanny wings
that make no sound. When the barn was empty what a place for games and
romps!
Then we had the great Fair of the county, an event to which we looked
forward, as we also looked back, for the whole year. The "Mart," with
its entrancing canvas galleries full of tops, work-boxes, every
beautiful thing that heart of childhood could desire, its peepshows and
merry-go-rounds, its Richardson's marionettes, its Wombwell's
menagerie--the thought of it must bring a glow to the heart of any
Norfolk native who knew it when I did. All right-minded parents took
their offspring to the Mart, if it was physically possible to take them,
and I am clear in my mind (though I was afraid to inquire when I was
there) that nothing to compare with it exists in England to-day. The
fair itself may exist, for what I know (its charter was granted by Henry
the Eighth), but if it does it will be but the gibbering shade of its
former self, lagging superfluous; for its human complement has for ever
passed away. I have heard my parents say that their parents went to it
to buy those silk dresses and those china tea-services which were family
treasures and heirlooms from generation to generation. We went to it for
dolls and Noah's Arks and tin trumpets and wooden tea-things, driving
home with armfuls of delight through many miles of snow or biting wind,
cuddled down in our wraps within the hood of the "sociable." The Mart
was "proclaimed" on the Tuesday following St Valentine's Day, and
continued for, I think, three weeks afterwards.
Well, then came May Day and the garlands; Easter celebrated by the
wearing for the first time of our new spring Sunday clothes--white
bonnets to be quite correct; the "haysel" which meant warm days for
romps in the fragrant cocks; the seaside--greatest bliss of all.
Summer, with its long light, its apparently few resources for killing
time, did not weary us, that I remember. In the summer holidays, when we
lived at D----, my brothers used to sit on a river bank and watch the
floats of their fishing lines from dawn to dusk, often without getting a
bite, and did not consider the day wasted. Little females had their
dolls to take a-walking, their hoops and skipping-ropes, and battledore
and shuttlecock, their dumb pets to rear, their little garden plots to
weed and till. Their elders were satisfied to sit under trees when work
was done, with needle or pipe or book--for we did have books. A little
amusement seemed to go such a long, long way.
Then autumn--harvesting, blackberrying....
I do not know how I acquired the idea that I should find the old
blackberry hedges, the sweet masses of hawthorn and dog-rose and
bindweed and nightshade and all those old hedgy things, swept away by
the hand of the progressive agriculturist, but such had been my belief
long before my return home. In the second chapter of my book of
Australian reminiscences I now read with a blush my ignorant lament over
"beauty vanishing from the world" in the shape of sailing ships, the
Pink Terraces of New Zealand, and _the big bird-thronged hedges of rural
England_. I suppose I reckoned on the methods of high farming being much
the same in all countries, without allowing for the good taste and
reverent conservatism of English landlords. The hedges were all there
still, more beautiful to me than ever, and I went blackberrying with a
basket, just as I had done as a child.
Harvesting--I saw it again on the old lands. I was in the midst of it,
reminded at every turn of the old times. But there were no children
playing amongst the shocks and stacks, no reapers with sickles, or
gleaners filling their turned-up skirts with the scatterings left
behind; the mechanical reaper gathered every straw. And there was no
Harvest Home. The village churches all had their Harvest Festivals,
exactly like ours in Australia; but the procession of the Last Waggon
through the golden fields, the Harvest Supper--they are gone with the
piquant Valentine and the jovial Waits, to return no more.
I looked at the barn, where we used to celebrate the arrival of the Last
Load. I looked at the coach-house--neither of them altered in the least,
that I could see--where the memorable banquets had taken place. I used
to go to them, under my father's wing; at any rate, I must have gone to
one, for nothing is clearer to the eye of memory than the picture of the
rustic faces around the festive table. Husbands in clean smock-frocks
and wives in their Sunday best, no sociological knowledge in their
heads, no divine discontent in their souls, to impair their enjoyment of
"the master's" hospitality. Unlimited home-brewed was dispensed to them
with the roast beef and plum pudding, but I remember no rowdiness in
consequence; only clouds of smoke, a succession of highly proper songs,
and vociferous applause of the performers. It was etiquette for all to
"favour the company" who could, and each singer seemed to have his own
one song, listened to by his fellows with unwearied interest and
appreciation year after year. As regularly as harvest and harvest supper
came round, we had "the highten days o' June" from the oldest throat
that could pipe a quavering note:
"In the highten days o' June
Napoleon did advance----"
That is all I remember of his song, the first line of which originally
ran: "On the eighteenth day of June." My father had his "Simon the
Cellarer," or what not, to contribute to the programme, and smoked his
pipe and drank his beer with his men, and appeared to enjoy himself as
much as they did.
Now, in the interest of good-fellowship and good cheer, we have the
Harvest Festival, from which the agricultural labourer is conspicuously
absent, as a rule.
However, the inevitable is the inevitable. The past is past. As all the
conditions of that old time hung together, together they had to go. And
there is still a Future for the unborn to experiment in.
Harvest Home having been celebrated, the "master" was free to make
holiday with horse and gun, and my father was ever eager--too eager--to
do so. Weather that was right for hunting was a matter of more joyful
satisfaction to him than weather that was right for crops. All thought
of crops was thrown to the autumn winds as soon as "the season" opened.
Those old roads of Norfolk were to me haunted with hounds and red coats,
echoing with the music of the pack and the horn. I asked Mr B., as he
was driving me from D---- to my cousin's house, how hunting stood in the
old hunting county now. He shook his head mournfully. According to him,
although he was still a young man, the heydey again was gone, never to
return.
He had it in his blood, like me, from the dead and gone, and so we were
more or less prejudiced. But it would seem clear to the understanding of
the most unbiassed person that the sport must have been more interesting
in the old times, if only for the reason that hunting men did not wedge
in hunting with a dozen other diversions, often in half-a-dozen
different places; they gave their hearts and the season to it, falling
back upon a little placid subsidiary shooting (over dogs) on off days.
There were fewer railways and miscellaneous lions in the path of the
straight run; there were more foxes, "stout" in proportion to the
healthy peacefulness of their bringing up. Townsfolk did not "run down"
in crowds to a country meet--they could not; the uninitiated outsider
who did intrude where he was not wanted accepted the stern discipline of
the field as part of the natural order. Farmers were similarly
old-fashioned, and in easier circumstances; they were insiders moreover,
although few of them aspired to the red coat--as fine riders and
steady-going sportsmen as their landlords. They bred hunters and took
puppies to walk, and farmed land so that it was not too fine to be
galloped over. And barbed wire had not been invented.
Let me hasten to say, however, that I, personally, do not regret the
inevitable change. In spite of my feelings on those haunted Norfolk
roads, and my talk with Mr B., my heart does not sympathise with
mourners over the decadence of the old sport. The beginnings of the
heresy that the morals of "sport" in this form are open to doubt--that
animals, after all, have some poor rights--seem to be welcome signs of
progress on the true line of civilisation. Heresies of to-day have a
fashion of changing into orthodox beliefs to-morrow, and this heresy is
bound to follow the rule. Hunting that is not for food or in
self-defence is like war--a relic of the savage state, surviving only
because its nobler attendant features, its refined conventions,
traditions and associations disguise the savagery.
I have seen an exhausted fox making a last spurt for his life, brush
down, tongue out, coat wet, eyes wild with despair; and I am glad to
think that, after all these years, it is possible for the human heart to
feel a stir of pity for him. It felt none then. My gentle mother, who
had followed the hounds herself in days of better health and fewer
babies, loved to pack her little brood into a phaeton and drive them to
some likely spot for seeing something of that brutally unfair contest
between an army of giants and one little scrap of heroic life. I vividly
remember an occasion when the horse in the shafts happened to be an old
hunter of her own, supposed to have outlived his enthusiasm. At the
first sound of the distant chase he propped as if shot, with pricked
ears and snorting nostrils, and then bounded at a closed gate, with the
intent to go over it, phaeton and children and all. It took a good
horsewoman to deal with that situation, and she managed to prevent
trouble by hastily detaching him from the carriage and hanging on to him
until the hunt had passed.
After that Taffy took us on these expeditions. How perfectly I recall a
still, soft day, a quiet road intersecting deep woods--a road dark in
summer with the leafage of overarching trees--the phaeton with the white
pony drawn up under the hedge, the mellow hunting cry of the pack
sounding nearer and nearer, the speckle of red coats appearing and
disappearing through the skeleton copse, the excitement, the rapture,
the triumph--and a poor little drabbled fox struggling to evade his
fate. He broke from the further hedge, crossed the road, and entered the
hedge beside us almost under Taffy's nose--one of the most sensational
incidents of a hunting season that I can remember falling to the lot of
us non-combatants. Dead beat he was, his heart bursting, his limbs
scarce able to carry him; yet even tender-hearted women and children had
no feeling for him in his lonely fight against the forces of the
universe, no chivalrous impulse to befriend him in his extremity. A pair
of horsemen crashed through the opposite hedge into the road--Lord S.
had lost his cap, and his hair was wild about his head--and they reined
up to speak to us. To their excited "Where? Where?" we shouted "There!
There!" and pointed them after the fugitive. And if he fell into the
jaws of the hounds at last I am sure we congratulated ourselves on
having helped to put him there.
I passed the very spot that afternoon, and it was just the same; only
now it rained, and the trees were in full leaf, and there was no fox,
nor hound, nor horse.
The dignified figure in the Hunt is, of course, the last-named animal.
He never sees the quarry, probably, or knows there is one, or cares. It
is not the lust of chasing and killing that inspires him to his gallant
deeds--neither in fox-hunting nor in war. Watch a soldier's horse in the
evolutions of a review. A colonel of my acquaintance has told me that
the moment the band of the regiment begins to play he feels his
charger's heart bound against his boot; so it is the music of the pack,
telling of glorious effort and exercise, which fires the blood of the
hunting horse that only hunts by proxy. The "scent of battle" is the
scent of the old primitive life in free air and space, the "Call of the
Wild" to the still half-tamed.
Horses were a passion in my family on both sides of the house. As a girl
I have had my maternal grandfather named to me by strangers as "the
doctor who drove the beautiful horses." His were not the requirements of
the hunting man; he demanded the perfect form and action, the satin
coat, the faultless turn-out. He was a very tall, high-nosed,
stern-looking man, strikingly resembling the Iron Duke, and I used to
see him come out to inspect the work of his groom before starting to
ride or drive. He would not say a word, but would take his handkerchief
to wipe some infinitesimal speck, visible to his eagle eye alone, and
show the resultant stain to the guilty man; it covered him with
confusion and dismay.
This martinet handled the reins himself, except at night, when other and
less valuable animals were used--"Nightmare" was the name of one of
them--until the state of his health obliged him to go abroad in a closed
carriage. He hated this, and the necessity for giving his horses over to
a hired coachman; and he was always putting his head out of window into
the cold winds and fogs, that were so bad for him, forcibly to reprimand
that much-to-be-pitied man. One raw winter day the grandfather's short
patience gave out; he mounted the box himself and drove the empty
brougham home, regardless of consequences, which proved fatal to him. He
caught pneumonia or something of that sort, and died in a few days.
As I may not be speaking of him again, I should like to say that,
haughty old man as he was, taking the high hand with patients of all
grades, he was most attentive to the poor, and never took a fee from
them. The tradition is that he never sent an account for attendance to
anyone--would not condescend to it (having traditions of his own behind
him, along with a pedigree stretching back to the mists of prehistoric
time)--but that's as may be; he certainly left a very comfortable
fortune, which, like that of the other grandfather, never reached the
legatees. A son with whom he had been over-strict had run away from home
many years before, and never afterwards been heard of. It was deemed
impossible to fulfil the direction of the will to divide the property
between the testator's children until the missing one was produced, or
irrefragable proof of his death. Through all the period between my
childhood and womanhood the newspapers of the world were calling through
their agony columns for one or the other, and in vain. It was reported
at intervals that his grave had been found, in New Zealand or
Kamstchatka, or some equally remote corner of the earth; or that someone
had met somebody who knew him or where he was; at which times the
lawyers were put upon the trail to hunt the matter down. Each of the
producible children had her separate batch of lawyers, and Chancery took
charge of the steadily dwindling estate. Many years elapsed before the
missing one was officially assumed to be dead, and the dregs of their
patrimony allotted to his sisters; and then the portion that would have
been ours was gone. How well I understand now little incidents that were
devoid of meaning to me when they occurred: mother, in tears, confiding
to a bosom friend: "'Do you sign this of your own free will?' he asked
me before us both, and what could I say?" Poor mother; who struggled
for us so hard! And the Married Woman's Property Act is of very little
use to wives like her, who still cling to the old ideals of family life.
So we were always tantalised with "expectations" that never materialised
in cash. We children, as we developed the faculty for romancing,
beguiled ourselves with a special one of our own. Some day, in some
dramatic manner, the vanished uncle--lost long, long before we were
born--was to reappear, with his pockets full of gold, to play godfather
to his impoverished relatives. We were always looking out for him. A
strange step on the gravel, an unexpected knock at the door would
instantly suggest to us that the psychological moment had arrived. But
no one could ever have been lost more thoroughly than that poor boy, who
ran away at night because his father had been too hard on him. From that
day to this;--covering something like three-quarters of a century--he
has made no sign.
If my grandfather's love of horses caused his death, the working of the
same passion in my father's weaker nature was rather more unfortunate.
He sacrificed to it and its kindred fascinations the important interests
of his life, including those he held in trust for his wife and children.
I do not say it to blame him, who was so kind-hearted and well-meaning;
he was as he was made--happy-go-lucky, careless, thoughtless, sanguine,
a boy to the last--and it was bad for such an one to have the illusion
of "money coming to him" to encourage and excuse folly. In the fifties
he was not a poor man, but he was too poor for the company he kept, too
poor to afford to neglect business and indulge in the expensive pastimes
of those who had none. But if he could be at M---- with the beloved
"Harry" V., who was so generous with mounts, he would not be at home
with uninteresting ploughmen. Norfolk folk who are my contemporaries
will not need to have that "Harry" more fully named to them, especially
when I add that I heard him spoken of as "The Old Squire" all over the
western part of the country, although he had been dead so long. M----
House, his once hospitable home, was quite close to my cousin's Abbey,
and, although my father had been there so much, it was the first time I
had seen it. I walked around the walls and grounds that were so familiar
to him, but did not attempt to enter, the family being in residence.
Since my return to Australia I have learned from a mutual friend that
they remember his name and the old companionship; so I might have been,
and regret that I was not, less modest. The old squire and the golden
age of fox-hunting in Norfolk, it seems, passed together, and the one is
said to be as likely to return as the other.
But a rather probable reason for this seems to lie in the fact that
Norfolk has become such an extensive game preserve. Passing the old
estates, whose old owners wore the pink as a winter livery, I noted the
little colonies of coops by the gamekeepers' cottages. At Sandringham I
saw pheasants sauntering about the royal domain like domestic poultry,
and caught the gleam of their bronzy plumage again and again in the
twilight of the thick woods. Evidently they are brought up in the lap of
luxury as well as in swarms, and are too precious to be scared and
scattered by trampling hosts of horses and hounds.
Times have changed for the one sport as for the other. And, thinking of
the difference, I am drawn to the conclusion (though it is not for me to
have opinions, I know) that the shooting season cannot be to the common
run of sportsmen what it used to be to their fathers. They may shoot
better, and at more birds--they do, and so they ought--and for rich men,
as one can understand, the old system is not comparable to the new; but
the sport was more genuinely sport--was it not, my fellow-fogies of
sporting blood?--and it must have had more charm for the many, if not
for the few, than is the case now. When the stubble was left for
partridges, and not ploughed up as soon as cut, and the fields and
plantations lay quiet, through all that golden month which I believe is
virtually useless to the scientific gunner to-day--when the autumn was
still young and lovely and the red leaves on the trees--that must have
been a pleasanter surrounding for the sportsman who was a lover of
nature than murky skies and naked woods. To have the companionship of
dogs, such as dogs used to be, cleverer than the masters with whom they
were in such perfect sympathy and partnership--as a dog lover I cannot
understand how men can have bettered sport by leaving them out of it. To
wander at will over field and along hedgerow, with the muzzle-loader of
the period over shoulder, the sufficient game-bag on hip, powder and
shot in pocket, and the trusty scout ahead, undisturbed by steam-ploughs
or the fear of fluttering preserves, no restriction whatever upon one's
liberty and inclinations; this must have been as good a form of
recreation as the drilled sharpshooting of to-day, although it may not
have been as good business.
At any rate, my father loved it--at such times as he could not be
following the hounds.
And so the winter came on, and the whist parties of an evening; and
presently the exciting preparations for Christmas. Then Christmas
itself--the holly, the mistletoe, the resplendent tree, the feasts and
dances and miscellaneous merrymakings. The old year passed with these
cheerful obsequies; the birth of the new year was celebrated in loving
family conclave and with chimes from the village belfry (we could not
have midnight services in a church with no lighting apparatus); another
year of the same uneventfulness, which yet was to be as full of interest
as ever.