AT THE SEASIDE
I have been looking over a batch of new magazines, and the heading of a
paper in one of them gives a sentence borrowed from a letter of Thomas
Bailey Aldrich to William Dean Howells, which I will borrow again for an
opening to this chapter: "I've a theory that every author while living
has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near
and distant places and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who
never knew him in the flesh. When the author dies this phantom fades
away ... then the dead writer lives only in the impression made by his
literature." Having written this down and looked at it, I feel that it
is not so profound a saying as I thought. The first proposition is as
obvious as can be; your eidolon is in the pages of your book, and the
more directly you speak to your affinity the more quickly he responds
(and he cannot respond effectively unless you are there to know it); the
second seems to pass over the fact that when these spirit friendships
materialise they become as other friendships, independent of literature
or any outside thing. What I set out to show, by my quotation, was that
the friends my eidolon had made for me in England outnumbered the
friends of corporeal origin, and that some of them gave me my happiest
English days. I flew to their arms as naturally and fearlessly as if I
had lived with them in the flesh for as many years as we had otherwise
known each other, and when I am dead I shall not be a dead author to
them, but a dead woman. Alas! the phantom fades away in any event.
This I have found to be the prime joy of authorship--the knowledge that,
when you are projecting yourself into your book, although nobody around
you may know or care what you are talking about, you are still bound to
reach some who will perfectly understand. You are speaking to your
unknown kindred in the near and distant places; if you do not know it at
the time--but you do know it--the proof comes later in the letters of
some of them, who tell you they have been impelled to write. Precious
recognition! And letters are so eloquent between the lines that you
rarely make mistakes about them. They tell you that the wireless message
has got "home" to where it belongs--or otherwise.
At the beginning of this century I published a volume of personal
reminiscences, entitled "Thirty Years in Australia." Coincident with the
conversion of the colony of Victoria into a state of the new
Commonwealth, the thirtieth year of my sojourn within her borders was
completed in 1900, and it seemed a good time to say something of what in
our young country we call the "old days," the "good old times," the old
pioneer colonial life of which the records are so few at home and the
ignorance abroad so vast. Although, when I come to think of it, I
believe it was merely as a rest from novel-writing that I started upon
the work. I gossiped through the casual chapters--drivelled, some may
say, much as I am doing now--with no idea that the completed book would
be other than a trifling by-product (my London agent agreeing with this
view), of little interest to readers outside Australia. But behold! Of
the score or more of "works" to which I must plead guilty, this one has
brought me more happiness than all the others put together, on each of
which the profit in love has been more considerable than the profit in
money. Old friends of the seventies, long passed from sight and
knowledge although not from mind, recognised themselves in the guarded
initials of their names, and they or their widowed partners or their
children wrote to tell me where they were, to recall past
companionships, to urgently beg and hospitably plan for a renewal of
them. And thus came delightful reunions, mendings of gaps, comparing of
experiences, comradeships for old age such as can never be for those who
have not spent some of their youth together.
But far beyond the number of these were the friends not made by accident
but by the design of Nature, although the accident of the book
discovered them--friends altogether unknown until it found them for me
in the near and distant places--also to be lost no more.
Away in Ireland lived a retired colonel of Hussars, who one day took it
from the shelves of his local library. He did not fancy the
title--Australia was not a name to conjure with in the British Isles,
British though she was--but, after turning a few leaves, he thought it
might serve for an idle hour. He read it aloud to his wife after dinner,
and when he had finished it he wrote to me. It was the beginning of a
correspondence which, by the time I started for England, gave me the
hope of seeing them as one of the joys before me. And when I arrived
their welcoming letter was amongst the first batch to come on board, and
notified that he was himself in London, "at my service." As was the case
in every situation of this kind, sanguine anticipations were fulfilled,
and something left over. Never once was I disappointed in a spirit
friend made flesh. I met him first at luncheon in the house of the
beloved friend who had set herself to give me the time of my life, and
he helped her to do it. I shall not forget the Ascot week of 1908.
Certainly I have not much time to remember it in, but if I had a hundred
years it would be the same. After we had "done" London--the restaurant
dinners and the plays, the pictures, the flip-flap and the Sports' Club
at the Franco-British Exhibition, little gaieties of a world I had not
known but took to like a duck to water--he planned out my route to
Ireland. That would have been the crown of all, but time and money would
not stretch to it. Never mind. I still expect to go there some day.
Then away in Boston--Boston in Massachusetts--there lives another dear
friend, discovered just as he was. For years we have corresponded
intimately, and every line that I write for the press I can regard as a
letter to her. She would come to Australia to see me, if she could; the
possibility of such an enterprise on the part of a much-engaged wife and
mother has been considered; but her promise to meet me in England,
should I ever be there, was absolute. One does not allow for the
"visitation of God" in making one's engagements, and it was only that
which abrogated this one. I heard from her that she had been ready to
start, not for London but for my ship at the docks, to be the first to
receive me, bringing over a motor for my English use; and illness in her
family had stopped her. She begged me to wait for the following spring,
but I could not; and so we have not materialised each other yet. If we
never do so, we shall love each other to the end. But we are hoping
still.
And there were other friends of the eidolon in England and inaccessible,
whose letters of welcome awaited me at Gravesend. One of them lived, as
she still lives, at that watering-place on the Norfolk coast where I
spent happy summers with my family when a child. That is to say, she
lives in the new watering-place (not in existence then) which is an
offshoot of the one I knew, still an old village, which its modern
neighbour was from the first forbidden to touch. The lord of the manor
comprising both--he who kept drinking houses and dissenting chapels off
his land for so long--had a sense of the fitness of things so fine that
it was almost a fad. When he allowed the new watering-place on the cliff
where but one solitary house--an inn--had stood in my time, he laid the
plan of the town himself and permitted only a beautiful brown stone of
the locality to be used for the houses. Now vulgar bricks and
jerry-building are creeping in, because his son, the present squire,
cannot help it; but the good taste of the founder can stand up against
them for a long time to come. It was never the typical fashionable
watering-place, and, thanks to him, never can be until his work is swept
away.
It is a great place, however, to have grown up in the interval since I
walked to it from old H----, with my governess, to inquire at the "New
Inn" (old then, and a beautiful house now) whether by chance they had
such a things as "Revalenta Arabica," which a doctor or somebody had
recommended for our dying baby, and for which we had ransacked the
village in vain. I think that was my last sight of "The Green" that now
is, which the local guide-book describes as "a standing reminder of the
artistic mind that conceived and executed the formation of H----." To
the people of this part, _they_ are H---- now, and the ancient village a
mile away is Old H----; more often it is insultingly referred to as the
Old End; to me the village is H----, and this New H----. Of course this
H---- monopolises all the luxuries of civilisation; not only the old
"New Inn" (with a new name and enlarged and important), on one side of
the Green, but a huge G.E.R. Hotel, with the railway station under it,
on the other; a great Town Hall, a grand pier with pavilion at the end
of it, a fine stone-balustraded "Sea Walk" above the beach, public
gardens, public tennis-courts; a splendid church, with its independent
vicar and curate, and (which should surely make the late squire turn in
his grave) a Wesleyan Chapel and a "Union" Chapel, the latter evidently
some other irregular denomination, since I do not think New H---- has a
workhouse yet; besides gas and telephones and all such things.
And so here lived my friend, where she could be quite comfortable. But
in the days when she was not a widow, but wife of a rector of the
neighbourhood--and before that, as a member of an old Norfolk family
(she married into another)--she knew all about the H---- of my day; and
when she chanced to read "Thirty Years in Australia," and penetrated my
dark allusions to the locality and my unprinted thoughts about it, the
kindly notion came into her head to tell me that my old H---- of
cherished memory was still there, unchanged. With the divination of a
spirit friend she knew just what it would mean to me to know that. Not
only did she write to tell me, she sent me a bundle of photographs to
prove her words. When I received them, I had no ghost of an idea that I
should ever see H---- again with my bodily eyes, and they gushed tears
over the little postcard scenes, so full of sad and sweet reminders of
vanished hands and days that were no more. I kept them on a table by my
Australian bedside, and used to strike matches in the middle of the
night and light a candle to look at them once more, and again once more.
Little did I foresee the day when I should buy them at their place of
origin (fourpence a dozen) for myself!
Of course I wrote to thank her, although I could not find words to thank
her adequately; it was the beginning of a correspondence signifying a
lasting friendship.
And, amongst the many unexpected things that have happened to me of late
was my visit to H---- and to her, just a year ago from this date of
writing about it.
For once letters had not revealed the writer; she was not at all the
type of woman they had suggested to my mind; nevertheless we suited each
other, to use an expressive vulgarism, "down to the ground." In spite of
a constitutional objection to strangers and dislike of "company" as
such, common to us both, and in spite of marked differences of view upon
important points between us, a very short time sufficed to bring us to
that state of mutual trust and understanding in which we could say
anything we liked to one another. And that is a state that many lifelong
friends, the vast majority of them indeed, not to speak of near and dear
relations, do not attain to.
But I must not talk here of our private affairs. Nor can I dwell as I
would like to dwell upon the domestic aspect of the fortnight we spent
together. I can say this much, however, she has the instinct for
home-making that is so surprisingly lacking (according to my experience)
in nine housewives out of ten. The stupidity of my sex in this important
business is one of the perennial annoyances of my life. It is not a
question--or in but a very small degree a question--of money. Mrs B.
would know how to make a bark hut comfortable, or a fork of the
ancestral tree. So would I. I could not have loved her as I do if her
house had been disordered and her habits out of drawing; I am sure she
must have cared less for me if I had not appreciated the refined
simplicity combined with luxurious comfort of her ménage. I do like
comfort, and see no reason to apologise for it as for a gross taste and
a low. When I go into splendid rooms that are not used, or that have no
fire in them on a chilly day, I feel as cross as when I see someone
sitting by the open door of a railway carriage when the train moves,
without putting out a hand to shut it. When I passed through Mrs B.'s
kitchen (at such times as it was convenient to us to return home by way
of the back gate), and looked upon M.'s shining range and twinkling
dish-covers, the clear, dustless fire, the bright rug on the spotless
floor, the cheerful red tablecloth, and her little tea, as dainty as
ours, set out--that to me was a beautiful room, surpassing the saloons
of palaces.
Our days were ordered perfectly, for real, downright comfort, when that
was all that needed to be considered, as was then the case with Mrs B.
and me. She knew intuitively that I would like my tea at half-past six
better than at seven or later--as she did herself--and brought it to me
then in her own hands, which had prepared the delicious tray. This was
to strike the keynote of the harmonious hours. Having refreshed myself I
had an hour or two of reverie in my soft bed, my brain cleared to
brightness by the tea, the freshness of the summer morning about me. It
was the only house except my own in which I had ever found it possible
to do a bit of professional work, and it was in that peaceful interval
between tea and bath that ideas for it were born and shaped themselves.
At eleven the pony-carriage came round. She is a fine whip, but never
used the implement on her own pony, a half Arab, wholly aristocratic
animal, not quite in his first youth; he and she were on the footing of
mother and son, with a complete understanding between them. Just to keep
him in his place she would pretend to draw the whip from its socket
occasionally, and although he had no eyes in the back of his head it was
enough to recall him to zealous duty. He nuzzled in her coat pockets for
sugar, and he knew her voice when he could not see her, whinnying wildly
from his stall at the livery stables, where she sometimes visited him.
Almost daily he arrived to take us out, always in a fresh direction,
always over country that I had known and loved and never hoped to see
again, until I began to forget I had ever left it.
At one o'clock we returned--I ravenously hungry--to the ever-perfect
meal. Thereafter more or less subdued and somnolent we repaired to the
drawing-room and two seductive resting-places therein; one was a
remarkably comfortable long sofa, the other a remarkably comfortable
deep easy-chair, and each of us took one, and it did not matter which.
The day's newspapers lay at hand, and our respective work-bags, but we
frankly allowed ourselves to drop asleep, which was perhaps the most
profitable occupation for a pair of grandmothers at that period of the
day, although one I was not accustomed to indulge in. At half-past four
came M., with the tea-table, her transparent bread-and-butter, her
memorable cakes and hot cakes, her jug of freshest cream, the boiling
kettle and the caddy. And after such a tea as that, it was well that the
next item of the programme was a walk, to prepare us for the equally
appealing little dinner to be engaged in at eight.
It was in these walks that I drew nearest to the ghosts of the old days
that thronged the place. Some obscure spinal delicacy prevented my
hostess from going far on her own feet, although she was so majestically
erect and so strong and young to look at; so she would carry book or
knitting to a seat upon the Green (a grassy plateau at the top of the
cliff, sloping seaward), or to one of the glass-walled shelters, useful
Queen's Jubilee Memorials, planted at intervals alongside the cliff
path, between the Green and the Lighthouse, and there rest and amuse
herself while I wandered as I liked. We were so entirely at ease with
each other that no apologies for such casual separations were required.
Naturally I walked away towards the Old End every time. And as soon as
the last Jubilee Shelter was behind me I was in the world of my youth,
where almost nothing was changed. How many hundreds of times had my feet
scampered along that dear cliff path--to come back, after such far
wanderings, to find it just the same! Only a track in the sea grass, a
little more hollowed out perhaps, a little nearer to the cliff face,
which the waves below had nibbled away until there was barely room to
get past the lighthouse wall. The same wild scabiouses that we found
there in bygone Augusts were blooming, richly purple as the clematis on
Mrs B.'s house front, along the cliff edge. Half-a-century was gone like
a passing puff of wind as I stooped to gather them. A dozen times I had
to stop and wheel to look across the sea so different from every other
sea; and in the evening fight, especially in clear shining after rain,
the old "Stump" stood up like a pencil-mark on the far-distant horizon,
and I saw again the ravelled threads that meant Skegness on the one hand
and "The Deeps" on the other, familiar as the nose on my own face. This
cliff path used to be the beat of our old friends, the coastguardsmen,
who paced it solemnly day and night, with their telescopes under their
arms. I saw no coastguard now, or I must have accosted him, and asked
him to let me peep through his glass, for old sake's sake. He used to go
on one knee and steady the instrument on his shoulder, and we used to
stand behind him to gaze and exclaim.
Down below lay the great green-haired boulders, the tumbled rocks of the
hard conglomerate that outlasted the superimposed strata of the
rainbow-cake-like cliff, where doubtless the contraband cask or case
found--or but for him would have found--temporary storage in the good
old times; but I did not go down, because now the trippers pervaded the
beach (leaving to the residents their more aristocratic terraces and
Green), and the squalid litter of their picnics defiled the place.
Half-a-century ago it was our happy hunting ground, and almost all our
own. Here we plied bucket and spade from morn to eve; gathered
marvellous treasures from the clear wells and pools between the rocks,
ammonites out of the grey marl, "thunderbolts" out of the red chalk;
chased crabs and shrimps and little fishes, built forts and castles,
sailed boats and nursed dolls, and so on and so on; busy and happy the
livelong day. At this point we were caught by the tide one day, and had
to sit on a rock ledge till it uncovered the way home. In that
archipelago of boulder-islands my foot once slipped into a crevice and
was crushed, and the landlady of our lodgings rubbed salt into the
bleeding wounds because, she said, that was the way to prevent
mortification. Every flat stone, all up and down the beach, was eloquent
of mid-morning and mid-afternoon meals, when mother or nurse came down
to us with loaded basket to stay our little stomachs between breakfast
and dinner and dinner and high tea. Oh, how magnificently hungry we were
in those days! And what digestions we had!
The first old landmark that I came to after leaving New H---- behind me
was the ruin of St Edmund's Chapel. A little fragment of a building that
looks, almost as primitive as the cliff supporting it, I should think it
could be carted away in a day by a couple of labourers who set their
minds to the job; yet there it stood, not a stone displaced, that I
could see, since I had played about it as a child. King Edmund the
Martyr, say the old chroniclers, built the hermitage of which this is
all remaining to commemorate the spot where he landed and to make
himself a private study in which to learn the whole Book of Psalms by
heart. Think of the hundreds of years of its history, back of the fifty
of mine! I used not to think of it, but I thought of it a great deal
when I stood on the hallowed ground again.
Then came the lighthouse--still the old lighthouse to the best of my
recollection, but with a Marconi installation and a few cottages and
their families added to it. And once it seemed to stand away in a field,
and now it is so near to the cliff edge that there is scarcely room to
get past the wall. The wall may be breached at any moment, and it will
not be long after that before they will have to rebuild the tower.
I leaned over that low wall and looked into the enclosure. The men were
having a game of cricket--such a natural thing to see where one sees a
group of official Englishmen doing as they like in their off time (they
were playing cricket at Aden and at Suez, regardless of the sweltering
heat). When these lighthouse men, coming and going in their game,
glanced towards me, watching them, it struck me as such a strange thing
that they did not know who I was. I felt almost as if I had more right
to be there than they. But when I totted up the years of my absence and
the years of the oldest man amongst them, I knew I could be nothing to
him but a stranger and an outsider, even as any other summer visitor out
for a walk along the cliff. Yet how I longed to beckon him to the wall
and ask him if he remembered the old times!
Beyond the lighthouse the cliff fell away gradually to a gradually
diminishing sand-bank--as, of course, it had always done; and,
descending the sloping path, I saw below me my old village, my own old
beach, untouched by the hand of "improvement" which had been so busy
near by. No, not quite untouched; the old village inn and coaching-house
(when we first frequented the place there was no railway, and we coached
the fifteen miles from L----) was now "The Golf Links Hotel," enlarged
and modernised, and it had absorbed into its new grounds an old lane
between hedges, along which we used to go and come, and which I had
desired to perambulate again; but neither the hotel nor the links
obtruded into the picture, which was substantially the same as I had
known and remembered it. The bathing-machines had been moved from their
former prominent position, and they had been a great feature. Every
morning a couple of them rolled us into the water, where the
bathing-woman was sometimes cruelly employed to dip us under, and haul
us out again; and a picture of a little brother squatted naked on the
roof of one of them, whither he had leaped from the wheel to evade her,
and whence he refused to budge for any threats or blandishments, was
plain before me when I looked for the machines where they used to be.
But this was the real thing--this was the old place, sacred to the old
times. Once more I waded through heavy sand, that sifted into my boots,
as we did before New H----, with its greens and esplanades and Jubilee
Shelters, was dreamed of; I had to look about before I could find a
clump of sea-grass on which to rest after my walk, while I surveyed and
meditated upon the scene.
As was the case with other haunts of childhood and youth revisited, the
actual place was not half the size nor of half the importance that I had
supposed. To think that this little patch of beach and sandbank, with
one occasional sail-boat (old Sam's _Rose in June_), a few donkeys and
four or five bathing-machines for all its furnishing, should have been
such a dream of romance, such a memory of joy, for more than
half-a-century! But there was no doubt about it, and less than ever now.
All the year round, in those old years, from late summer to early
summer, I used to be counting days to "the seaside" again; and the
rapture of each first evening when, the coach having dropped us at our
lodgings, and our tea having been unpacked and eaten, we trooped to the
beach (buying our spades and buckets at the post office on the way), to
make sure that the sea was there before we went to bed--I could not
outlive it in a thousand years. If ever I was happy in this mortal life,
I was happy here, although I did break my heart over the corpse of a
baby brother and have salt rubbed into a cut foot--also a governess in
attendance and lesson-books, at times. But not _the_ governess,
fortunately; otherwise old H---- would not have called me back like
this.
The tide was in, peacefully lapping the smooth shore. When it went out
it went a long way, uncovering many acres of fine ribbed sand, strewn
over with sea jewels; and great dark patches, that were mussel beds, the
treasure ground of all. What multi-coloured sea-anemones we found there!
And how hard it was to remember that the returning tide, with its
unseen flank movements, would assuredly drown us if in our absorption we
lost count of time! And away there, also hidden under the silver sheet,
lay the mysterious buried forest--post-glacial trees with their black
trunks and limbs intact, in one of which a stone axe was found sticking,
just as the Stone Age man had left it. There were, I had been told, ebon
gateposts, dug from this submerged woodland, on farm lands of the
neighbourhood, and fragments came into our possession, fashioned into
brooches and bracelets, as presents from local friends. I used not to
consider the significance of these things. Now I read the buried forest
into the pedigree of my native country, the splendour of which is lost
upon those who stay at home.
When I was rested and had gazed my fill, I rose and turned to the right,
up the low bank, towards the village--to find our old camping-places, if
they existed still. I ought to have gone through a wicket at the top of
the bank, through the narrow, high-hedged lane, past the windows of the
old coaching inn, through which Honor W. used to lean and chat with the
casual wayfarer and her father's guests. Where is that pleasant-voiced,
happy-faced daughter of the old inn now? Does she sit somewhere, in cap
and spectacles, darning socks for her grandchildren, amongst those who
never realise that she was once young and handsome? I gave her memory
greeting, while I turned my head from her transformed home. Just here I
found myself rather alien and astray, but only for a few steps.
For there, across the road, were the coastguard quarters, as surely
their old selves as I was. And no feature of the place could have
appealed to me more eloquently, if only because in one of them the
antiseptic surgery I have spoken of was practised on my foot. That was
in a summer when all of the few regular lodging-places had been bespoken
ahead of us, and we could only get in by the desperate expedient of
subsidising the coastguard. Three of the little dwellings divided the
family amongst them, the largest available parlour being the rendezvous
for meals. I slept with two sisters in a four-post bed with
blue-and-white-checked curtains, and the dispossessed rightful occupiers
used to cross a corner of the room to get to their makeshift couch
elsewhere, after we had retired and were supposed to be asleep. We did
not like to miss the event of the stealthy passage of our coastguardsman
from door to door, creeping in his stockinged feet, shading his candle
with his hand, on such nights as he was off duty.
One of his brother officials was a clever worker in jet, amber and
cornelian, found on the coast; his jewel-trays, prepared for summer
visitors, held ornaments that were an ever-recurring joy to inspect and
finger, especially if we could buy something--a cross or heart or string
of beads for the neck, or a "faith-hope-and-charity" to add to one's
bunch of charms. Another and particularly dear coastguardsman employed
his genius and leisure for years upon a large model of a battleship of
the period. It was the glory of his spotless parlour, which it quite
monopolised. He said he was going to present it to the boy Prince of
Wales--afterwards Edward our King. Crowns and palaces would be as naught
to him, we were sure, when he found himself in possession of this wonder
of the world. And did he ever?
Wandering on, I came to the cobbled courtyard, closed with a wide door
at night, in the recesses of which we kept house through another summer.
The very cobbles were there still! And farther on, the terrace of larger
houses--_the_ houses, snapped up by the early birds--where we sojourned
for the summer of several years, and where the little brother died. Dear
little golden-head! Dolls were nowhere in the season when he reigned. It
was the end of the summer, through which his sunny beauty had been the
admiration of the beach and the adoration of his family, that he was
snatched from us. The terrace reminded me of one forgotten shadow upon
the shining picture of the Past--the black day when father and mother
drove away with the little coffin in a closed carriage, to lay him with
his baby forerunners in the churchyard at H----, leaving us behind with
our governess in a paradise despoiled. Miss W. it was, father's
favourite, she of the Rowland's Kalydor-and-ink affair. And, by the way,
I remember that, soon after our return home that year, I went to L----
with her, and accompanied her when she paid a call on the lady principal
of the school where she had been educated, who had recommended her to
us. This lady had an imposing presence--I can see her now--in dark blue
poplin or black moire antique, adorned with a collar of choice lace. She
and Miss W. were brightly chatting together, when I interposed with the
great and solemn news that I had been bursting to impart: "Our baby is
dead." I think I expected her to collapse under the shock, but the shock
was mine. She glanced at me casually, then turned to Miss W. with a
laugh. "Well," said she, "it's one less for you to be bothered with."
And Miss W. laughed back as she replied that, yes, it was. Oh, no doubt
she was a cat, the pretty and amiable Miss W. And the lady principal, a
wife and mother, was just the sort to have had the training of her.
I did not get as far as the old church on these occasions, when I
rambled alone between tea and dinner. The pony carriage took me there,
when we drove about for two hours between breakfast and luncheon, and
through the beautiful old park, that even now was so proudly exclusive
that the public might pass through the gates on but one day of the week.
But I had not forgotten the tombs of the old family--fourteenth and
fifteenth and sixteenth century monuments--and its great home, where it
had dwelt since William the Conqueror, when the Norman founder took a
Saxon lady to wife. Never, from that day to this, has the line of
descent been broken, or the lord of that line been dispossessed of these
lands. The charters that gave them are still in the muniment-room of the
Hall, and Mrs B. showed me an enclosed copse, a dark piece of wild
woodland, which she said was Saxon land that had never been touched
since a Saxon kingdom owned it. The key was a sacred heirloom of the
family, and one of the articles of the family creed was that no feet
should enter there except its own. The whole history of England had
passed it by--this one bit, probably the only bit in all England, of
virgin Saxon territory!
O England! England! How wonderful she is!