A TRIP SOUTH
There are people, and they seem to me the vast majority, who have no
curiosity about or interest in anything or anywhere outside their
business and domestic boundaries; who "wouldn't cross the street," as
they say, to look at the Parthenon or the Sphinx, or see anything in
them if they did; to whom a guide-book, with photographs, means a map
and a railway time-table and an indicator of the tariffs of different
hotels. But the passion for travel--to "see the world"--has possessed me
from my youth up. It has grown with my growth, and has not waned with
the waning years. As long as the faculties of vision and locomotion
remain to me, I shall cherish dreams of the Sphinx and the Parthenon,
Venice, the Swiss Alps, the castles of the Loire, the thousand and one
beauty spots of the all-beautiful world, which I have yet to
see--trusting in the Fates, which have begun to indulge me, to give me a
sight of some of them before I die.
I do not think they could drop me down anywhere and leave me altogether
ignorant of where I was, so far and wide has an exploring imagination
led me, and so much has it made of its every opportunity, since I first
began to read and to look at picture-books. After thirty years of life
in the Australian Bush, I went one day to a tea-party in Melbourne,
where one of the entertainments provided was a guessing competition. One
wall of a room was covered with prints and photographs of public
buildings of the world; they were of miscellaneous character, old and
new, selected so as not to be too obviously familiar or to give an
unfair advantage to experienced travellers amongst the guests. I had
never travelled; I do not think I had seen one place of the many
represented--except the Wilson Hall of the Melbourne University, which
was the only one to puzzle me; yet I won the first prize easily.
Happily, the beauty of a beauty spot is not dependent on human or
historical associations, and the Australian Bush fed fancy well when it
had no other inspiration. Likewise, when the opportunity to return to
England came, unprovided with means for much sight-seeing within the
country, or any whatever outside of it, I was too happy in what I had to
miss what I had not. It seemed almost as much as I could bear to roam my
native county, and see the homes of childhood, Old H---- and Rising
Castle as I did; after that satisfaction I felt like being now able to
depart in peace--that I had not lived in vain. And when in the month of
September--still golden weather, for that English summer was made on
purpose for me--I set forth to visit Devonshire, then I felt that
Aladdin's Lamp and the Philosopher's Stone were not "in it" with my
command of luck.
In my young days, be it understood, with this spirit of enterprise so
strong within me, I saw nothing of the world outside the eastern
counties, and not much of them, except when the dear eldest aunt
mothered me so much too carefully in London now and then; nor had I
when, in 1870, I was abruptly detached from my belongings to be taken to
the other side of the world--not to see another inch of it until I
arrived. But all through those early years I was storing up knowledge of
the beauties of England, putting together mental pictures of scenes
which I had fair hope of beholding with the eyes of the flesh in
time--although, as a matter of fact, I have not seen a tenth of them
even yet. As they seemed to come under the head of things attainable
that were unattainable, and not, like foreign places, of things
unattainable that were unattainable, a reasonable hope was justified.
Nor did I stop at hoping. I weeded the garden and gathered snails for
pennies, went without sugar for sixpence a week, while my brain seethed
with plans for better business, in the effort to give substance to some
of my dreams.
All the places in Scott's novels--my first romances, read aloud to us
little girls by our mother as we sat at our sewing tasks about her knee;
all the castles in the English histories; the lakes and fells of the
north, the soft hills and dales of Derbyshire, the moorlands of Jane
Eyre and Katherine Earnshaw, the Devon of Lorna Doone and Amyas
Leigh....
I cannot count them. But, of them all, Devonshire was my dream of
dreams.
My grandmother lived her last years there, and there she died. From her
and the aunts we had descriptions of the county and its manifold charms;
they only ratified what I had already learned. I think this must have
been before the youngest aunt became a royal governess, or it may have
been there was an interregnum in her career as such; anyway, she had
her home in Devonshire at this time, which may have been a reason why I
did not go there. However much I might long to see a place of dreams, I
could not have wanted to see it in her company. Besides which, to go to
Devonshire from Norfolk, in those days and to untravelled persons of our
means, loomed as huge an undertaking as it would now be (not to me, but
to rural stay-at-homes) to go to Egypt or Madeira from the same place.
At any rate, I did not go. I communed with my favourite Blackmore (as I
now commune with his successor in my regard, delightful Eden
Phillpotts), and dreamed of going some day. And when the some day came,
it was my last in England for eight and thirty years. For the first time
I crossed the land from east to west, on my journey to the ship in
Plymouth Sound. Leaving Paddington at night, darkness (not sleep) hid
the most of the way, but the light of the May morning came early enough
to show me the part I had most longed to see. Pale dawn it was, and the
train rushing along, but in all my years of exile I treasured the
impressions of the little that I saw; they but fixed the old dream and
made it permanent. I still had scarcely begun to realise it, but I
seemed to know better what it would be to realise it. "We are to return
in five years," I remarked to my drowsy partner, for so we had promised
to do, in the innocence of our hearts. "Then we must see Devonshire."
We did not return in seven times five years, and when we did I might
never have seen Devonshire, as I have never seen the lakes and fells, or
Kenilworth, or hosts of things, but for one of those little happenings
which come without warning us of the great ones in their train.
Some few summers ago I went to a new place to spend the Long Vacation
with a son whom I was accustomed to companion at such times. Alone of
our family, we chose, when choice was ours, the wilds of nature for our
holiday resorts; and he sent for me to join him on an island that he had
discovered, in a cottage that stood on its own lone beach, where we
could live the simple life like Robinson Crusoes, plus the advantages of
a general store (only one) and a daily steamer to and from the mainland,
within the distance of a healthy walk from our abode. I went, and we had
a great time--then and on several subsequent occasions in the same
locality. No maids, no dressing; no constraint imposed and no effort
required in the heat of the year (the Long Vacation of Australian
universities begins in December and ends in March); absolute repose,
combined with delightful occupation. We walked out of our beds into our
morning bath in the sea, and returned for a plunge or an idle wallow at
any time of day that the whim took us. We never failed to bathe (in this
only bathroom at our disposal) before sitting down to our evening meal,
and more than once I have risen in a hot night to soothe restless nerves
in moonlit water. The sea was almost at our threshold, gently lapping a
beach as smooth to naked feet as a ballroom floor. On the other side of
the island, where it faces the south, the Pacific hurls its weight upon
rocky headlands and thunders in rocky caverns as stern and wild as
Caledonia's coasts can show. It was there we went for picnics.
Of course, we were not quite alone. The island had been discovered by
others and had boasted a tiny watering-place for years. Two hotels and
several boarding houses clustered about the single store (there are two
now) and the little pier where the little steamer called twice daily,
going to and returning from the source of fresh meat and newspapers; and
these houses were filled in the summer season, and we numbered friends
amongst their guests.
But the point to be mentioned is that our delightfully remote cottage
belonged to a gentleman through whom--although we never met or knew each
other--I came to realise my dream of some day seeing Devonshire. I often
wish I had known him; for by all accounts he was a rare and original
person.
In the oldest of our old times, the pre-gold times, when these lands
were being "taken up" by a gallant set of young men, cadets of what we
call "good" British families, he had been a pioneer squatter. But then,
while the days of our history were still the "early days"--before or
soon after my own arrival--he went back, married, settled and lived the
bulk of his life like any other English gentleman of wealth and social
standing, in accordance with the habits and customs of his family. I do
not know for how many years he had inhabited his fine house in
Devonshire, at which I was a happy guest so recently, but I know they
were a great many. Then, a widower, approaching a late old age, he
divided his large fortune amongst his nine daughters (reserving what he
deemed to be sufficient for his remaining needs), settled the family
house upon them for their joint use, and came back to Australia--to the
little island on the Victorian coast where by such a small chance we
found him.
Still farther along the lonely beach from our little cottage he had
built his last home, much of it with his own hands. A four-roomed
weather-board house, bare-floored, unceiled--sufficient, and no more.
Here he had been living for some time, with one man for his whole
establishment--the uncrowned king of the island, who could not meet a
child without giving it a coin, or hear of a necessity that he did not
exercise all his gentlemanly ingenuity to relieve, as when he sent a
sack of sugar to a struggling mother "to make lollies for the little
girl"--when two of his eight daughters in England (one was married in
New South Wales) came out to see how he was getting on. I think it was
not until they arrived that he built new rooms for their accommodation,
and it is significant that at the same time he built himself another
room quite detached from the house, which he left to their more
civilised control, and the maid who was now added to the establishment;
but, whether he invited them or not, he had reason to bless their
coming. Unless he was the sort of man who would just as soon die alone
and untended as not, which he very likely was.
I joined my son on the island the day after the old man met with the
accident which caused his death. One of the many children who put
themselves in his way at every possible opportunity had been to see him,
to announce a birthday and receive the inevitable half-crown, and in the
course of the proceedings had spied a small rifle leaning against the
wall. It had just been used, or was going to be used, on minahs that
were eating the orchard fruit. Unseen by his host, the boy picked up
the weapon, and, "fooling" with it, shot his benefactor in the leg. I
heard of the mishap, and of the periodical inquiries from our cottage as
to the patient's state. No alarm was manifested, and his daughters came
to see me. Later, as the wound seemed obstinate, it was thought wise to
take it to Melbourne for treatment; and one morning they carried the
unwilling invalid along the beach before our cottage to the steamer that
was to take him thither. He raised himself from his stretcher, and waved
his hand to us, and that was all I ever saw of him. He died in Melbourne
some weeks later. But the island, all aweep and heart-broken, got his
body back; and his grave on the sandy hill, in the midst of sea waters,
seems an appropriate resting-place for such a man--more so than the
monumental vaults and tombs that hold the dust of his kin of England.
To his one Australian daughter he left his Australian home. I rented it
from her for a year or two. The daughters who had come out to see him
returned to their sisters in Devonshire. I stayed with them for some
time before they left, and we parted as friends, and with the mutual
hope that we might meet again. There was small prospect of a reunion in
England then.
But the time came. To my unutterable surprise I found myself there,
engaged to pay them a visit. One of them, that is the elder, with her
father's nomadic blood in her veins, voyaged back again after a couple
of years and set up her tent on the island much as he did, only rather
more luxuriously. Her return coincided with my departure, and for the
moment I missed her at both ends of the world. But M. was at home, and
to her I set forth joyfully on a morning of September, about a year ago
from this date of writing.
I took that once formidable journey alone, my husband being absorbed in
the pursuit of partridges, which was happiness enough for him. He had
been marking them down all the summer and had brought his favourite gun
across the world for their sakes; by the same token I had to pack it
amongst my clothes because he had not room for it in his own baggage,
stuffed with the rest of his sporting paraphernalia. And at first it
looked as if the Fates were still inclined to head me off from
Devonshire. I was all ready to start a week before I did when I slipped
on the stairs and sprained my foot. I signified the necessary
postponement by telegram with a foreboding heart, and as soon as I could
hobble, in a slipper, flung all regard for appearance to the winds and
got ready again, before more accidents could happen. And then I had, so
to speak, to fight my way.
I had never travelled any distance alone, having no vocation for
independence, but I assured my caretakers that any fool or baby could
get about on English railways without risk or trouble. It was otherwise
at home, where porters regard themselves, and with reason regard
themselves, as your gracious patrons, who do not seek you, but have to
be sought.
"All I shall have to do," said I, remembering my drive from Liverpool
Street to Eaton Place for half-a-crown, "is to take a hansom to
Paddington Station. The porters will do all the rest for me."
"Oh, nonsense," said they, "to waste time and money on cabs, when there
is an Underground that will take you straight across the city from one
point to the other." They would not hear of it.
By the Underground I was to go, and so carefully was I provided for that
an important official of Liverpool Street Station was engaged in a
friendly way to meet me there and personally conduct me from train to
train. The salient points in my appearance were described to him and his
to me, and when he readily undertook the job assigned to him it was
reasonably assumed that I was safeguarded as far as human means could do
it. That I went wrong after all was not their fault nor mine. It was in
the first place the fault of one who told my friend who was the friend
of the Liverpool Street official--to whom he immediately forwarded the
false information--that I was going by another train. In the second
place it was the fault of a porter. Poor, dear porter! In whatever form
he waited upon me he was an ideal servant to my Australian notions,
although I was sufficiently altruistic to wish him for his own sake the
standing of his antipodean brother who is not a servant but a potentate,
self-respecting to hauteur in his conscious command of the situation. In
the present instance he was but human and over-zealous, and I would not
blame him for the world.
When my train from Cambridgeshire drew up at its London platform he was
ready for me at the carriage door, as usual. And when I looked beyond
him for his superior who was to take charge of me, and saw no one
resembling our mutual friend's description of him, I was relieved and
pleased. For I had rebelled against the waste of his precious time and
the obligation I should be under to him, although overruled by
assurances that the favour would be on my side. I had protested that
the English porter was all-sufficient for every possible need that could
arise.
So now I put myself into his hands with as complete a trust as the
highest official or a whole Board of Directors could have inspired; and
I told him I wanted to go to Praed Street by the Underground, and asked
him to see to everything and put me on the right train. And I gave him
sixpence.
Perhaps that was a mistake. I was always being told that I had no
business to give a porter more than twopence (the Australian porter will
condescend to pocket sixpence, but I never dared insult him with less),
and I used to make it threepence when no one was looking, without
feeling that I had been too generous, in deference to the customs of the
country. It is certainly an odd thing that the only two little railway
accidents that befell me in England were due to the only porters I gave
sixpences to. It would almost seem as if so much prosperity turned their
heads.
On this occasion it was to make assurance of the right train on the
Underground doubly sure that I tipped my man the first sixpence; and he
laid himself out to earn it in such a way that I was ashamed not to have
made it a shilling. He bought me my ticket for Praed Street--that was
all right; he put my luggage on the train and myself into the special
care of the conductor. He did all that man could do. But it was the
wrong train.
I discovered presently that I had been along that same Underground
before, on one of my visits to the Franco-British Exhibition. I had not
taken much notice of the names of passing stations then, having the
usual escort; but now I did. And Praed Street seemed an immense time
coming along, whereas Paddington was left farther and farther behind us,
and signs of our approach to Shepherd's Bush accumulated. So I spoke to
the conductor. Imagine the feelings of an innocent abroad! "There's no
Praed Street on this line," said he. "You are in the wrong train."
I kept my head fairly in an experience unprecedented in my career. I
confided in the conductor--because I had found that in England you can
go to any official in a difficulty, with the certainty of getting good
advice and every possible assistance, and he told me what to do. I did
it (with my luggage and my lame foot) in the sweat of my brow, somehow.
I got out at the next station. For once, no porter, until a passing
civilian, appealed to, sought one out for me, who, when he appeared,
acted as the dear man invariably did. I returned to the station the
conductor had told me to return to; exactly the same thing happened. The
civilian in this case connected me with an elderly, slow porter, who
seemed to have all the business of the train and platform to himself. I
knew what the time was. I thought of where I was in London and of my
friends in Devonshire, driving three miles to meet me; and I cried to
that poor, doddering old man that I would give half-a-crown to anybody
who would help me to catch the Exeter express. He stared at me as if he
wanted time to get such a stupendous proposition into his brain; then he
sadly realised that he could not do it. But from somewhere out of the
ground sprang a vigorous young porter who without loss of time took the
matter in hand.
"You run along as hard as you can run," said he, "and I'll meet you
under the big clock."
I did run, although in other circumstances I should have believed it
almost impossible to put my left foot to the ground. And I ran the right
way too, although I did not know it, and although I have a natural
genius for taking wrong ones; up and down stairs and along devious
passages, sped by the directing fingers and shouts that answered my
gasping query to every railway man I passed; and so I came out on a high
gallery in the great arena of Paddington Station--to see my train below
me, but still far away, and the big clock that was my rendezvous with
the luggage porter (nowhere to be seen) pointing to the very minute that
the time-table fixed for its departure!
I flew along that bridge to the end, hurled myself almost headlong down
the stairs to the platform, reached my train; and there was still no
sign of the luggage porter, far or near, and they were shutting the
carriage doors, and the guard was lifting his hand to give the signal to
start. He was a fine, big, important-looking man--I shall not forget
him--and but for my experience of English railway officers it would not
have occurred to me to approach him at such a moment; but I had the
happy inspiration to do so, and was thereby saved.
"He will be here directly," said that guard with the manners of a
prince. "I will hold the train a moment."
He held it for moments that made two minutes before my laggard henchman
came into view, and then helped him to bundle my things into the
corridor of my carriage, there being no time to seek the van. Blessings
on him! I hope it may be my good fortune to travel in his charge again
before I die. And I was only a third-class passenger.
That is another of the pleasures of English railway travel. At home we
have no third class, and your own servants do not deign to travel
second. I do not myself, except sometimes on a country journey, the
long-distance trains having a special character and equipment. But in
England the third-class carriage was our only wear; but twice did we put
on airs and take a second--a first never. In Australia when you ask for
your unspecified ticket, unless you are blatantly horny-handed and
begrimed with toil, the young man behind the wicket gives you a
first-class as a matter of course; in England he gives you a third, with
the same inward knowledge that he is doing the proper thing, no
questions asked. And with that evidence in your hand of your lack of
social consequence, you are of as much importance as anybody to the
English official, who is a gentleman every time. My guard of the Great
Western could not have done more for me if I had been the queen.
And so, thanks to him, I was off at last. In a full carriage, of course,
where I had to sit in the middle, but still, safely embarked for
Devonshire. And when the agitation of my nerves subsided I looked at the
passing landscape which I had last seen as a girl and a bride and
thought of all that had happened--heavens! what had _not_
happened?--since that far-off day. Its face might have changed--it must
have done--but it was the same country, the same towns and villages, and
woods and fields. I had seen them for the first time in the twilight of
a May evening in 1870--that evening of farewells and heartbreak, of all
evenings in my life--and never since till now ...
One advantage of being a third-classer is that you can chat with a
neighbour without misgiving, if you feel that way disposed. I could not
read in English trains; it would have been a wicked waste of eyesight
when there was so much better than books to look at; and if you do not
read you either incline to talk or you are supposed to be ready to do
so. There was a little lady in the corner next to me whom I liked the
look of, and who apparently returned the compliment, and we made one of
those little ships-that-pass friendships, which are often as pleasant as
they are brief, before she left me at Newton Abbot, to branch off to
Cornwall. She had a school in that county, but had been called from it
to a sick brother in America--in the Wild West too--a couple of years
before we met; and his illness, death, and difficulties resulting from
them had only now released her to return to the quiet life which had
been so violently interrupted. So she had had her great experiences and
was having them now as well as I. She had left a _locum tenens_ in
charge of her school, and she did not know how she was going to find
things, nor how she was going to settle down into the old narrow groove
again.
As in Port Said, I was minded not to dock my trip of any of its charms,
and would not bring the customary private sandwich for my midday repast.
There was a restaurant car on the train (we have them too, but I have
never used them), and I intended to enjoy the novelty of lunching
therein. I had seen photographs of the tempting interiors--third
class!--in magazines, and from the platforms of great junctions had
peeped at them through their own glass windows. It was another bit of
experience to be taken in its course and the most infinitesimal bit was
valuable.
So at one o'clock I rose and proudly journeyed down the train. But I had
not noticed the preliminary boy sent round to collect orders, and the
Master of Ceremonies politely informed me that the tables were filled.
Another luncheon would be ready in half-an-hour, he said, but now I was
"off" lunching that way, and wished I had catered for myself as usual.
Returning to my seat I found my neighbour with her little refreshment
set out on a napkin spread over her neat lap. She insisted on my sharing
it with her, and after decent demur I did. There was a meat-pie and I
had half; two cakes and I had one; two bananas and I had one. Later on I
returned her hospitality as best I could by inviting her to tea with me,
and then I sampled the possibilities of the restaurant car and found
them all that I could wish.
By this time we were in Devonshire. We were actually waiting at
Exeter--Exeter, of which I had heard so much, endeared by so many old
associations--and I was too deeply engaged with my good tea and nice
bread-and-butter to seriously and adequately realise the fact. Alas!
when it comes to tea I am afraid I am a gross person.
But I did not see Exeter in 1870. It was dark night then. I do not know
if we even passed that way. Later in the afternoon, when I came to the
scenes on which that old, old May dawn rose so tragically, you might
have offered me tea without my seeing it. I could see nothing but the
Devonshire that was all I knew, and think of nothing but identifying as
much of it as possible. Ivy Bridge, name as well as place, I had had the
memory-print of for all the years, but it lay beyond my goal to-day.
That other place, unknown, where the sea came up to the railway and the
train ran through and under the red cliffs, I found was Dawlish. Sweet
spot, so long beloved! I am told that the one blot on the beauty of
Dawlish is the railway on its sea-front. This is from the resident's
point of view. Let him remember what its position means sometimes to the
passing railway traveller.