DEVON, GLORIOUS DEVON
Being in Devonshire I sat down on one of the most notoriously beautiful
of all the beauty spots of the county. It was traditional that the old
gentleman of the island who had had several homes, and the means to make
them what he would, never had one in a place that was not beautiful. The
island, as I knew, was beautiful, in its wild solitude of sea and sand
and ti-tree scrub. Otherwise his family home in England was as great a
contrast to the home in which he had chosen to spend his last years as
could possibly be found. As I moved about the large rooms and up and
down the stairs, every wall set thick with the valuable paintings he had
gathered from abroad and from Christie's and from Royal Academy
Exhibitions, it was odd indeed to think of the weather-board cottage and
the few prints from illustrated papers tin-tacked to its pine lining,
which he had deliberately preferred to them. The whole establishment,
with all the dignities of fine family furniture, family crested silver,
full staff of trained servants, and so on and so on--without one
irregularity or eccentricity in its administration--represented the
normal English gentleman's life, that of his kin and class, and by
general use and wont his own. Yet, of his free choice, he left it all to
go and live like Robinson Crusoe in an island hut, with a rough,
wood-chopping Friday, and a domestic equipment of Britannia metal and
stone china that could not stir the envy of a tramp.
After all, one can understand it. An old Australian, at any rate, can
understand it. In his young days he had been a pioneer squatter. What
old man looks back on this experience otherwise than with the feeling
that he has seen the Golden Age? Never one that I ever met and I have
met many. One can realise how the memory of that time of liberty and
sunshine swelled and swelled (in a man with the imagination to love
pictures and a fair outlook from his windows) as the years of fettering
old-world conventions and grey skies went by. The older he grew the
brighter shone the lights of the past--as with you and me, dear
reader--and the craving to return to the scenes of youth, which are the
realms of romance to the aged, must have been in him what the craving to
return to England was to me for so many, many years. He had heaps of
money, along with a singular power to discriminate between its real and
its apparent values. It enabled him to please himself when there
remained no dependent family to consider, and he pleased himself by
removing it as a burden upon a freeborn spirit, while retaining enough
to purchase liberty for the rest of life. I forgot to mention that
before he built his island cottage he bought a caravan and in that
humblest of homes toured the Australian bush and coast at leisure until
he found the spot to suit him in which to make camp permanently.
Never, said his daughters, would he live in any place that was not
beautiful.
Well, in Devonshire, at any rate, he had not done so. My spacious room
had a great bay of three windows, in which I could sit and batten on
beauty to my heart's content. My writing-table stood in one angle, and I
could not get on with my letters of a morning for the enchantment of the
view. Deep down below me lay a small exquisite lawn (every English lawn
is exquisite), shadowed at one side with fine old trees, and all around
with a beflowered wall; the old gardener was always pottering there,
shaving the grass a little every day, sweeping up every dead leaf that
autumn wind brought down. Below the garden again was the sunk road, so
deep and steep that I should not have known there was a road but for
hearing a carriage now and then and getting a glimpse of the top of the
coachman's hat. The farther wall lining the ravine showed just its stone
coping at the top, and beyond that was sea--all sea, with the wall
cutting across it--unless I turned my eyes to the left, where a splendid
red bluff breasted it. Could even Devonshire have composed a lovelier
picture to live with? But I am bound to admit that, three mornings out
of four, when I got up to look at it, it was lost in fog. However, on
the day of my arrival, when the evening light was peculiar, I saw
Portland through a telescope; and Portland, I was told, was full forty
miles off, and not visible from where we saw it above once in as many
years. I _did_ see it, but it was not so clear as the old "Stump" on the
sea-line that I had looked at from the beach in Norfolk.
Dear M. was determined I should lose nothing of the joy of Devonshire
through default of hers; and, with carriage closed, we spent the first
two pouring wet days exploring the lovely neighbourhood. It was lovely
in the most hopeless downpour. Then came fine weather, and she took me
to Exeter. As originally arranged, the plan was not only to "do" Exeter,
but also Ottery St Mary, the last home and grave of my grandmother. But
when we reached the cathedral city, a long journey, there was so much to
see and do that even to me it seemed bad economy to tax time, strength
and pleasurable sensation further. I said, "Oh, this is enough for one
day!" and we agreed to make it so.
I suppose it would be sinking to the deeps of drivel to say "How
beautiful Exeter is," but such is my opinion, all the same. And I walked
about it, as I did about most places that I visited in England, with
invisible companions, whose presence enhanced its charms. Years and
years ago--when I was at B----, between '75 and '78--a dear friend of
mine was an old lady of about eighty, the first English lady on the
goldfields, who was said to be, and must have been, the handsomest and
most delightful woman of that age known to Australian history. She was
Devonshire born, and her old husband--a solicitor, who had returned to
the practice of his profession when goldfields went out of fashion with
his class--told me she had been known as the "Belle of Exeter" in the
long ago when he had married her. She loved to talk to me of the
Australian "old days," but also she loved to go further back, and tell
me of Devonshire and her native city, always winding up with injunctions
to me to go there if I ever returned to my native land again. And here I
was at last, finding all her loving pride in the place justified.
Could anything in city planning be happier in effect than the position
of the cathedral in its quiet oasis amid the streets? And _what_ a
cathedral, inside and out! I have a cathedral that I call my own, and
never thought I should so overcome the power of patriotic prejudice as
to admit it could be surpassed by another. But when I returned to Ely
last time, looking for my shrine of all perfection, I got a shock to my
housewifely sensibilities from its ill-kept condition that wholly
unhinged the long-established point of view. The beautiful brasswork was
black and green, the beautiful oak carving outlined in grey dust, and in
that state I could not take pleasure in looking at them, even for old
time's sake. Perhaps they were waiting for some restorations to be done
with before turning to with the pails and brooms and chamois-leathers.
But all service-time I used to be catching myself absorbed, not in
prayers and sermon, but in anxious inward debate as to whether it was
not already too late _ever_ to make those brass gates bright again.
There was no dirt in Exeter Cathedral to dim its complete and finished
loveliness, and all its surroundings were in character and keeping with
it, "composed" by time and circumstance to make the picture
perfect--especially on a golden autumn day. What should be the cast of
mind of a bishop privileged to live in such a house and grounds as lie,
peaceful and stately and exquisite, under the shadow of the south tower?
I like to remember that one bishop of Exeter had a son who was the
father of my Eden Phillpotts, whose intellectual inheritance is the love
of beauty, uncloistered, unsophisticated; beauty at its primal source in
the breast of Mother Nature. M. and I pottered about these precincts,
still thinking we were going on to Ottery St Mary, until the spirit of
the place so possessed me that I could not tear myself away.
"Oh, this is enough for one day!" I said to M.
She understood, and we stayed, and let Exeter soak in.
She took me to one place and another, and one was the old "Mol's Coffee
House" that flourished as such in the sixteenth century, but had been a
private house at the time of the Armada. It is now in the occupation of
a firm of picture-dealers, who also have the sole right of selling a
certain pottery ware of local manufacture. M. was interested in a
collection of water-colours they had on view--she is herself a charming
water-colourist--but the setting of those pictures was the picture of
them all. We climbed a little, dark, twisty oaken staircase that had
echoed to the tread of Drake and Raleigh--the self-same stairs, just as
when they clattered up and down; and we stood in the self-same
oak-panelled chamber where they met their fellow-defenders of England's
shores, to discuss and arrange plans for circumventing the enemy. I
looked up from the water-colours of to-day to the age-bleached colours
of their shields of arms in the age-blackened oak, and thought of those
bygone committee meetings. Nothing changed since then, except the living
air, and those who breathed it, and their use of the old place. It could
not be put to better use. The firm in possession, who deal in art, are
artistic enough to respect the relic in their care. The spirits of Drake
and Monk and Raleigh, and the rest, might come o' nights to the old
rendezvous, and not feel they had no business to be there. In that room
I bought a packet of picture post cards--views of Exeter--that,
artistically considered, are the best I found in England. Whenever I
took one out to scribble on, I put it back in the envelope again, as too
good to be defaced in the post and thrown away, and the package is still
intact.
Then we went to a shop and I bought an umbrella. Does that seem an
incongruous association of ideas? Nothing of the sort. The pleasure I
have had, and still have, out of that umbrella, because of the place I
bought it in, you would not believe. My hand fondles it every time I
wrap its folds around its stick; I cannot put the loop over the button,
or take it off, without all the loveliness of Exeter flooding my soul,
the memories of that day.
Between luncheon and tea we attended a missionary festival service in
the cathedral. It was a Pan-Anglican side-show, not to speak
irreverently, with the usual miscellaneous assortment of bishops in
attendance. One met the swarming prelates here and there, in the houses
of their hostesses, and in places remote from the London centre which
had lately been the seething whirlpool of episcopal affairs; and,
without going to one of their great programme meetings, I came to know a
few, one from the other, and to take an interest in some. For instance,
in an American bishop, one of the most vigorous and alert-minded, as he
was one of the youngest, a "live" man, who seemed eloquent in his own
person of the country he came from; in a black bishop from Africa, who
one day waited with me for a long time in the outer shop of a firm of
clerical tailors, while my husband (frightfully particular about the cut
and set of coats) was being attended to within; above all, in a nice man
from India, with whom I spent an evening, mostly on a sofa-for-two, in
a London drawing-room. It has been my good fortune to make friends with
several bishops, never as bishops, always as unprofessional men. They
are bishops who talk shop to me before they are my friends, not
afterwards. And I can say of each one of the few who have honoured me by
meeting me on my own ground, that as men they are (were, in the case of
one long dead and two at the end of life) delightful. You would not
think it, viewing bishops, as one does, altogether from the outside; but
so it is. On this occasion at Exeter, it was one of our own Australasian
prelates who preached the sermon. I did not know him, as bishop or man,
and there was not much in his discourse, and I do not like sermons
anyhow; rather, I feel that they have outstayed their usefulness, which
was doubtless great when the preachers were more learned than those they
preached to; but it was an hour and a half of physical repose and
spiritual contentment, and I much enjoyed it.
Straight from the cathedral we went to our tea, the---- But no, I will
not say it again. After this refreshment we walked about a little more,
and there comes to mind a delicious little shop in an alley leading out
of the cathedral yard; it sold Devonshire junket and cream and butter,
as well as other dairy dainties, some of which were handed to us in card
boxes with ribbon handles that were a pleasure to carry the long way
home. Also I recall a moment of astonishment at finding that prawns in
England were considered cheap at tenpence a dozen. They were exposed on
an Exeter market stall at that figure. "Goodness gracious! Do you mean
to say those we had at lunch yesterday were that price?" I questioned
M., horror-stricken to think how lightheartedly I had ladled them on to
my plate, as mere prawns such as went by the name at home, only bigger.
Then she told me that her domestic fishmonger charged a penny apiece.
And when you think of the importance of pennies in England! I made a
mental calculation that at least seven shillings had been sunk in the
little dishful that I had reckoned as worth sixpence perhaps--because
the prawns were so exceptionally fine.
It was dark when we reached Exeter station, and we had to wait there for
our train. We sat down to dinner, without dressing, at a few minutes to
nine.
On another day M. took me to Plymouth, the special place of memories,
the "take off" for my youthful leap into the unknown world. "Shall I
ever see it again?" I asked myself, as I watched it fade in rain on the
tragical morning of my departure; and how small a chance there was that
I ever should! It was typically spring-time then. Now it was typically
autumn.
The heavy fog in which the September day was born yielded to the sun
before we started on our expedition, and we had again the sweet English
weather that was peculiar to that year. We drove to Cockington before
leaving the carriage at Torquay, and Cockington was another place of
beauty that I had kept thought of through all my adult life. A friend of
mine had wintered at Torquay in the long ago, and in daily letters at
the time had word-painted all the neighbourhood for me, supplementing
his descriptions with photographs, which adorn a girlish album to this
day; and so I knew Cockington well at second hand. But that was not
like seeing it on a lovely morning such as this. We left the carriage to
walk up the lane of the Forge and through the Park to the little
artist's dream of a church, and we poked about inside it, while the lady
of the keys jubilated in subdued tones over the recent birth of an heir
to the lands it stood on. "These woods,", said M., as we drove away
along the narrow, deep-sunk roads, "are thick with snowdrops in the
spring." Heavens! What must Cockington be in spring?
Then we took train at Torquay for Plymouth, and there I was again on the
old _via dolorosa_, which was that no more. Ivy Bridge, in the shining
morning, welcomed me back, all smiles; and the country, which I really
saw for the first time, filled me with delight. So richly green, where
it was not so richly red! And why have I never seen such cows as those
splendid, big, red Devon cows elsewhere? If this is the type of creature
bred from Devon soil, the heroic history of the county is
explicable--not to mention the quality of its cream.
Shades of heroes were all about us as we perambulated Plymouth town, but
all the time I was thinking of a pair of poor young things putting in a
last morning (after a bedless and sleepless night) roaming the same old
streets, close on forty years ago. I could recognise little beyond the
general features of the place, however. The town must have greatly
altered since 1870, and the fact is evidenced by the complexion of its
more prominent buildings. The great Guildhall was not, nor the second
Eddystone lamp-post in the sea; even the Armada Memorial was not, nor
the statue of Sir Francis Drake, though one would have expected to
recall them, weather-worn and venerable, as having dominated the Hoe for
centuries before that. But we have fine modern halls and monuments of
our own, and it is the Historic Past in which I live when I have the
opportunity; so I turned from the great Guildhall to the grey church
alongside, which enshrined the story of seven centuries within its still
stout walls. And when I stood on the Hoe, it was not to look at new
statues and lighthouses, but across the unchanging Sound, where once lay
a "fine new clipper" (as the papers described her); waiting for a wind
to waft her on her maiden voyage round the world. She was a vessel of
little more than a thousand tons, and hardly visible to the naked eye
from that point of view--then. But I saw her ghost in September last, as
plain as plain could be.
Then we had a long afternoon at Kingswear and Dartmouth--a still more
satisfying experience, if that could be. They are both so old, so
beautifully unmodernised and unimproved, cherishing the Historic Past so
faithfully! The Naval College, above and apart, does not interfere with
it in the least. We "did" Dartmouth first--cradle of the British
seafarer from time immemorial--and it was an æsthetic luxury indeed to
potter about that old, old church in its old, old graveyard, between
which and the houses snuggled up to it a narrow, deep-sunken, paved
passage gave right of way to living neighbours, case-hardened against
the toxic microbe in all its forms, one must suppose. The rood-screen
still bore what I had never seen on rood-screen yet; the figures of the
two thieves as well as that of the Saviour--the Calvary complete. The
pulpit was the gift of King Charles the First, and apparently in its
original state, less the colour and sharp outlines that time had worn
away. It is of carved stone, gilded and coloured, shaped like a
wineglass, and one wondered that even a small man should dare to trust
his weight in it. I could not realise a modern preacher there, or a
modern congregation. I should expect to see Richard the Lion Heart and
his knights stride in, to be blessed before starting out of harbour for
the Crusades; at the least--or, rather, the latest--the Pilgrim Fathers
kneeling together, seeking strength to set forth on their equally
gallant enterprise.
And those quaint, steep, curly streets, and those old timbered houses,
with their projecting upper storeys, all carved and crinkled--they are
the same the Pilgrim Fathers said good-bye to, and in which their kin
may have lived for centuries before that. The harbour itself has not
been altered since King Richard sailed out of it in 1190--so they say,
and nothing appears to the contrary. Imagine the seafaring history it
has made, the sailor life it has seen! Those very stones that you see
and touch and walk about on to-day, those very waters where the
_Britannia_ and _Hindostan_ now lie! M. and I had luncheon in a long
room, by a window overlooking the quay, and a dozen imaginary pageants
of the past entertained my fancy as I ate, looking out upon the now
quiet place. There was another wide window at the other end of the long
room, and that one gave immediately upon the churchyard. Below it ran
the sunk passage which did duty for a street--two people could just
about pass each other and nearly on a level with its sill the ancient
gravestones presented themselves to view, almost within touch, against
the background of that church which seemed to have been there for ever.
I think I remember that gravestones of great antiquity lined the passage
walls and made a pediment to the window of the restaurant. Could
anything be more appropriate to the character of the town?
When we had explored Dartmouth, as far as time allowed, the ferry-boat
took us back to Kingswear, where we proposed to have tea with a lady
living up on the hill. Here the modern came in, but not until we wanted
it--with the soft sofa and the recreative cup. Kingswear keeps its mate
over the way in countenance. The new homes tuck themselves unobtrusively
into sylvan nooks that soften or hide them--or so it seemed; I must
confess that it was tea-time, and I did not take much notice. Besides,
the way to the house of M.'s friend was so steep and so striking that I
was bound to confine my attention to it. Tier above tier, up shadowed
shrubbery pathways and mossed stone stairways, the various footholds of
the garden were laboriously gained. The approach reminded me of some I
had heard or read or seen pictures of, leading to villas on Italian
heights. It was very pretty, and the house when we reached it was more
than that. We had but half-an-hour there before we had to seek our
train, but it was a pleasant bit of the day. I envied our hostess her
house as much as I did anyone in England. From one side of it she looked
down upon the harbour--the _Britannia_ and the Naval College and the
green shores; from the other she looked away to the river
mouth--Kingswear Castle and the open sea. While immediately around her,
and adown her steep garden, she had all the privacy of Sandringham
before the avenue was blown down.
Another "day out" enriched my collection of impressions of Devonshire
with a set of charming memories. It was the day we went to the wedding.
"Now," said M., when she had explained to me that I was a potential
guest, "I am going to show you, one of the finest views in England."
Thereupon she described the situation of the country house which was to
be the scene of festivity. It stood very high, in beautiful gardens,
which dropped down and down in a succession of terraces, ending in a
deep coombe and the sea. It was quite a famous beauty spot, apparently,
and when I had seen it I should have seen Devonshire at its best. I did
not need to be told what that meant.
At daybreak the fog was very thick and so remained till noon. We dressed
before luncheon, having a long drive before us, and the fate of feathers
and furbelows still hung doubtful. The carriage came round closed, and
we slipped into wraps and set forth--my two sister-hostesses and
myself--and there was no sign of the weather clearing. We were all
fresh-air persons who could not stand being cooped up, and we opened the
carriage windows, and the fog visibly flowed in. To me it was an
agreeable circumstance--more so, for once, than the brilliant sunshine
to which I was almost too well accustomed. It did not rain, nor feel
like it; in fact there was not a drop all day, and we could see our way
before us, and on both sides as far as the hedges of the deep-sunk,
narrow lane-like roads. Those rich autumnal hedges tapestried the
impalpable wall behind them with lovely forms that were a joy to
study--wreathing ivy, intertwined with pink valerian, cascades of
traveller's joy like the foam of our wild clematis at home. What the
views beyond must have been I could guess, for we were driving for an
hour or more and it seemed to be stiff climbing all the way.
We arrived at the decorated village--a village for a picture-book, if
ever there was one. The road where the carriages of the assembling
wedding guests were left had the effect of a ravine in its relation to
the church above it. We looked up and before us rose an irregular
footpath, like a worn-away and dislocated staircase, curving round and
about the beflagged and beflowered churchyard hill; and its whole
length, which straightened out would have been considerable, was covered
with red baize which had evidently taken a good deal of fitting to make
it lie so that it would not trip up the bridal company. At the top we
could just see the outline of the church and the dim colour and flutter
of the most distant flags. Sunshine could not have created a more
charming effect.
The church is the crowning glory of that typical Devonshire village. It
dates from the fourteenth century and its registers go back to the year
1538, but old age is not all its claim to distinction. It has a precious
cradle roof inside and a not less precious rood-screen (time of Richard
the Second), and a lovely harmony of every stick and stone with every
other, that was a luxury to contemplate what time I sat among the
wedding guests awaiting the coming of the bride. To-day the slender
shafts of the screen had bridal flowers tied to them and nestling
beneath--pink predominating (Japanese lilies, I think), a colour which
"went" with the blackened oak as cold white blossoms would not have
done. I had but such glimpses of the chancel as the interstices of the
screen afforded; understanding that the chancel was a "restoration" I
was content with that. I heard afterwards that it had a "squint" and
rood-stairs, fourteenth-century brasses and other interesting things,
such as I made a reverent study of in my young days.
The bride arrived. She was a young Norwegian lady, and a bright-faced,
wholesome, happy-looking creature--as attractive a bride as one could
wish to wait on. The English bridegroom looked a good fellow, and I
trust he has made her a good husband.
They stood outside the screen and close to us for the first part of the
marriage service, which the officiating clergyman declaimed with
remarkable enthusiasm; then they passed into the sanctuary for the
completion of the rite. As a mere wedding it was like other weddings.
The coloured flowers in the decorations (I believe they were all white
in the chancel) was the only unusual note.
But when the bride and bridegroom came out of church man and wife
together, there were a couple of minutes when the bridal spectacle
surpassed anything of the sort that I ever saw. I want to paint the
scene, but I know I cannot do it--cannot convey to another who was not
there the impression it made on me. The subject may be "genre," but of
all the pictures in my gallery I can find none more poetically composed.
Let me try to sketch it somehow.
You must first imagine rural Devonshire and one of its sweetest
villages; the deep road, the hedges and the trees and the churchyard
slopes, the flowers, the flags, the scarlet carpet, the still rainless
mist. The red stairway twisting and dropping through the green from
porch to gate is now lined with the village children, all in bewreathed
new hats (provided by the bride's family), and they hold in their hands
baskets of flower petals, with which they bestrew the way of the bridal
procession. Down they come--we had preceded them to the road, or I
should have lost one of the sights of my life--down they come, winding
with the winding path, the bride with her veil up, smiling and bowing,
her white train and her young maids behind her; every figure, every
feature of the scene, refined and idealised by the (to me) extraordinary
atmosphere. Bright sunlight would have made a picture which I should
have thought perfect had I not seen it through this pure poetic haze. As
a study of fog effects--well, it is no use trying to elucidate the thing
further. But I carried it away with the delight of a collector in a work
of art that is unmatchable, and now it is safe in my gallery of Blessed
Memories, and I would not take any money for it.
When we drove to the house which commanded "one of the finest views in
England"--home of the bride's sister--a rather less density of fog would
have answered the purpose, instead of which we had rather more. The
house, with its platform and all the lawns and flower-beds and marquees
thereon, was quite plain to view; the first terrace was visible; some
trees between that and the second tier of garden loomed a shade more
substantial than their shadows would have been; below and beyond
them--nothing. Nothing, nothing but cotton-wool, a white blanket, a wall
impenetrable. Not a glimpse, not a hint of the coombe and sea that M.
had promised me. So that to this day I do not really know how lovely
Devonshire can be, although I can imagine that I know.
The visible house had the more attention paid to it, and within it there
was much to charm the eye of a wedding guest, apart from the show of
wedding presents. Our Norwegian hostess had brought to her English home
treasure of furniture and curios that I had to apologise for staring at
as if they were things in a museum; masses of black wood carved all
over, and strange pottery and metal ware, drinking-cups and the like;
they brought the Norse country, ere while distant and practically
unknown, to sight and touch, and set my unsated traveller's soul
a-dreaming of snows and sagas, mountains and fjords.
But the Norwegian wedding-cake was the pride of its nation, amongst them
all.
In the large marquee where the dinner-destroying marriage feast was
spread, there were two of these nuptial trophies, an English cake
crowning one long table, a Norwegian the other. The first was the white,
three-tiered, much decorated affair that we are familiar with, and I did
not go near it. The bride cut it ceremonially, and it was distributed in
the usual way. Then, escorted by her bridegroom, she came across the
carpeted tent through the smart crowd to where I stood at the other
table. "I must 'break' this cake," she remarked, with her pretty foreign
accent, and proceeded to do it with her two hands in what one perceived
to be the correct Norwegian bridal fashion. In case the reader is as
ignorant of the constitution of Norwegian bridescakes as I was until
that afternoon, I will try to describe it.
It may have stood two feet high, but obviously the size would depend on
circumstances, the same as with our own. In shape it resembled the tall
bottles, with their horizontal fluting, in which the ready-made
salad-dressing of commerce is, or used to be, purveyed, being a shell
formed of graduated rings of cake (much like the wooden rings for
stretching drawn-thread-work), laid one upon another from bottom to top.
They were as perfectly round and evenly graduated as if the paste had
been wound round a cone like cotton on a reel, but that is not how it
was done, because each ring was complete in itself and came off whole
when the cake was "broken," although previously it had adhered to the
rings next to it strongly enough to make the finished erection safe to
move and carry. This means, of course, that the stuff is not brittle,
but neither is it tough; it bites like a particularly nice macaroon.
When the bride had pulled off the two or three top rings, which were
broken into pieces of convenient size before being handed round, the
hollow within revealed itself filled up with sweetmeats; and here again
the purse or fancy would determine the kind and quality of sweetmeats
used. A cake of any size, filled with the best "lollies," as we
Australians call them, must be at least as costly as the corresponding
English cake, although it may not look so. As it goes down, ring by
ring, the miscellaneous internal goodies are distributed to keep the
surface even, which certainly makes it the more interesting of the two
to partake of; and it can assuredly boast the more cunning cookery. I
love a new experience, of whatever sort or kind, and I consider the
Norwegian wedding-cake an item of value to my store.
Altogether, I had a good time that afternoon--as usual. Family guests
allowed me not a moment to remember that I was a stranger, and I was
thrown for a while with a lady--introduced to me with special intention
as one who knew Australia--with whom I felt at once like an old friend,
although she had known Australia only as a tourist, not as an old-timer
like myself. We talked Australia and nothing else, but not quite as
another lady, who knew Australia as I knew it, had discussed the subject
with me at a Norfolk garden-party. We did not largely comment upon the
funniness of these stay-at-home English people, the unconsciousness of
the poor dears of how way back behind the times they were, and their
extraordinarily mistaken notions about us and what we were accustomed
to.
The fog had settled down for the remainder of the day, never having
lifted since day broke. It took the bride and bridegroom and their
carriage, swallowing them up before our eyes as we clustered about the
porch to bid them godspeed. Soon afterwards we drove away ourselves. The
hedgerow ivy and the foamy traveller's joy and the pink valerian were
still to be seen on the roadside banks, so close to us as we pounded
down the hills. The carriage windows were down, and the white veil
floated about us. I watched the gradual wilting of the already
discouraged feathers on the hat in front of me, until at last they hung
down lank and shiny, little beads of moisture fringing their tips. I had
tucked my own feather boa within my wraps, to save it, but when,
reaching home, I drew it off in the hall, it was like drawing a wet
sponge along my neck and cheek.
"Take them all to the drying-closet," said M. to her maid. And there our
wedding garments spent the night, coming forth dry and fuzzy in the
morning.
In Australia the drying-closet is not amongst our domestic appliances,
although its principles are applied to laundries. We do not need it. But
it is the "long-felt want" of every British home. Unfortunately it is
the privilege of the well-to-do. Since I am not likely to be able to
afford one, I intend not to wear feather boas when I go to live in
England.