IN THE GARDEN OF ENGLAND
Twenty years ago--or was it nearer twenty-five?--a dear girl came to
live with me as governess-out-of-school to my young children and general
aide-de-camp to myself. It was in the time, which spread over so many
years, when I was not strong enough for all the domestic duties that
properly belonged to me. I got her through an advertisement--the only
time I was ever beholden to such a source for such an acquisition. "A
young English lady" was the attractive description of her--the very
thing, to my mind, for my bush-bred infants.
I called on her at the Governesses' Home in Melbourne, and engaged her
on the spot. She had come to Australia for her health, but if she told
me so I did not grasp the fact; she looked as well and as good as I felt
she would be comfortable to get on with. Also she had come from a good
English house and a well-to-do and well-placed family, and was choosing
to earn her living rather than be an expense to her father, from no
compulsion but that of her own independent spirit; and this too was a
fact I did not grasp. She never allowed me to perceive it. Had she been
penniless, with only her casual employer to depend on, she could not
have served me more devotedly. She worked far harder than I should have
allowed her to do had I divined the secret weaknesses in her
sturdy-looking little frame, always with bright face and cheerful voice
and unslackening energy and interest. She seemed to have no thought for
herself at all. And yet she professed, and still vehemently professes,
that the time she spent with us was the time of her life.
However in the end she fell ill--very ill; then the secret weaknesses
revealed themselves, and the doctor shook his head over them. We saw
that governessing days were over, and her relatives were communicated
with. Her father sent out money for her needs and for a first-class
passage, and when she seemed able to travel we sent her back to him in
the care of a trained nurse. The doctor thought she might live to reach
her home, but he was not sanguine.
Well, she did, and is there still, bless her heart. At any rate I trust
so, she was a few weeks ago. Although the secret weaknesses seem
permanent and she risks her life every winter that she spends in
England--unfortunately, the Riviera, substitute for the more beneficial
and beloved Australia, is not always practicable--I anticipate that she
will be a hale old woman for many years after I am gone.
Through all the long interval between her parting with us at B---- and
my meeting with her again, she kept up a loving correspondence, and
every letter was a sigh for me to come home or a sigh to be back herself
in the sunny land where she had been "so well and happy." I had not the
leisure to answer half her letters, but when I was suddenly confronted
with the opportunity of my life, and sat down to inform my English
friends of the treat in store for them, it was with special satisfaction
that I wrote to the one who, I knew, would hail the news with more
genuine joy than anybody.
It was not until September that I found time to pay my first visit to
her. She lived in Kent, not a hundred miles from Maidstone, to which
town she journeyed to meet me--all in the wind and rain which were so
bad for the secret weaknesses. Partridges being the only living
creatures that my husband was then interested in--they had been
available to the gun three days--I went alone. Later on, just before we
sailed for home, I went down to her for a last week-end, and he followed
to fetch me and to shake hands with her before we left.
On that 4th September when I met her first after the long absence a
leading London newspaper made what now seems to me an astounding
statement. It declared that "we" had had "the most depressing August
ever known in England." All I can say is (and I trust I am not giving a
pair of rose-coloured spectacles away) that I have no recollection of
the circumstance. It was not a depressing August to me--I can swear to
that--and newspapers are notoriously sensational. "Ever known in
England" is absurd on the face of it, as the utterance of a probably
young man, and certainly of a man whose memory would not reach even as
far as the Coronation of Queen Victoria. But I do remember, and frankly
admit, that it was a wet day when I went to Kent for the first time. Not
only wet, but cold.
But that only made the home-coming to C.'s hearth and heart the warmer.
Warm I knew it would be, but even the loving correspondence,
undiscouraged by its frequent onesidedness, had not prepared me for the
discovery I made of my peculiar and permanent place in her regard. Of
the many happy experiences of life, few can match that of finding you
have been one of the deities of a faithful heart for over twenty years
of absence without knowing it. But that was only one of the surprises of
the day. Having stupidly missed the significance of first-class passages
and frequent Riviera winters, I had supposed myself bound for the sort
of home that you assume your nursery governess comes from, whereas I
arrived at a good country house, with fifty acres of estate to it, the
property of her family for generations, and now belonging to her and
three sisters jointly; an unpretentious establishment certainly, but
handsomely appointed and correctly administered--not like the bush
parsonage into which she had fitted herself so unassumingly. When
packing in the morning I had rejoiced in the innocence of my heart that,
for once, I need not bother myself with a lot of luggage; and I took for
my week-end a bag which at a pinch I could have carried in my own hand.
When evening came, and a bare-armed and bare-shouldered guest to meet
me, and I had nothing but a short cloth skirt and a high-necked blouse
to make a toilet of, I thought of something that an experienced
globetrotter, fresh from the West African wilds, had once told me. "One
thing I have found," said he: "wherever you go, if you haven't been
there before," and he was speaking of the least likely places, "it is
never safe to go without your evening clothes." I shall not forget that
in future. The irony of fate was in it when C. offered me a black satin
dinner-gown of her own. Sad--indeed, wild--as I was to be the one to
seem to show disrespect to her house, it was something of a comfort to
me to find that I had grown so fat in England (from seven stone five on
landing to eight stone two the day before this day) that I could not
make it meet by inches. I would sooner go to dinner in my petticoat than
wear a stitch of anybody else's--even hers, like a daughter as she was;
but I could not damp her loving solicitude by saying so.
She heaped luxuries upon me, even luxuries that she could not afford
(because I know just how far a quarter of the income of even a nice
estate as this was, in the chronic bad times of British agriculture,
would go, and that she supplemented it by selling plants from her
garden, and sometimes in other ways). When, after our great gossip over
our tea by the drawing-room fire, I went upstairs to make bricks without
straw, as it were, in my preparation for dinner, I found my pretty
bedroom, in which the fine old mahogany shone like glass, exhaling her
thoughtfulness all over it. In Australia, where your friends' buggies
are also their luggage carts, and where railway porters are so
precarious, you get into the habit of reducing your travelling kit to
the minimum, and a bulky dressing-gown is one of the things that can be
done without for a day or two, if you have an overcoat with you. I had
left mine behind, and lo! there hung from a chair by my warm fireside a
gorgeous robe of silk, embroidered outside, padded within, and beside it
a pair of quilted satin shoes to match--to go to my bath with, although
assuredly not meant for such humble use. That was the sort of thing.
When a carriage was had all the way from Maidstone, and kept with no
regard for the expense of wasted hours, I used the privilege of an old
friend and mother to remonstrate with her.
"Oh, _don't_!" her face and voice checked me from doing it again. "If
you only _knew_ what this is to me!" Well, I did know, and it was
knowledge to make one bless one's luck. How little we are aware of it
when we are setting bread upon the waters! I had been absolutely
unconscious of responsibility for this which came back to me after so
many years.
It was only from Friday afternoon to Tuesday morning that I could stay
with her on this occasion. But the best was made of that short time as
far as she could manage it. I saw as much as possible of the famed
Garden of England. Two months later, when I paid her the second visit, I
saw a great deal more. Both times my luck in English weather was "in."
My very first morning in Kent dawned bright and beautiful--after that
cold and rainy eve--and the day was all delightful.
We had breakfast in a sunny little sitting-room upstairs, a room with
lots of window light, and furniture covered with that calendered chintz,
patterned with flowers on a white ground, which is as cheerful to the
spirits as to the eye; C. and her sister who lived with her (the other
two being married and in their own homes), and my contented self, their
guest. Outside were lawn and old trees and plentiful autumn blossom; the
sun poured in; a little fire added a final touch of comfort--for I must
not be so low as to say it was bloaters and bacon (C. had remembered my
talk of English bloaters in the long ago as she had remembered
everything).
The admirable meal concluded I was taken a little walk about the place.
The estate had once been devoted to hops, and the back premises of the
solid old stone house were encircled by a great wall, broken with the
hooded peaks of kilns and lined with immense warehouses, where the crops
of the fields used to be treated and stored. Now the kilns were cold and
out of gear; the granaries were stores for fruit and ladders and market
baskets; and the bulk of the fifty acres of land bore orchards in heavy
bearing. I had struck a Kentish fruit farm at apple harvest, which was a
sight to see. Waggons were all day loading and driving off with their
piles of cases for Covent Garden, yet the army of pickers seemed to make
little impression upon the apparently countless millions of apples still
rosily shining in the sun. Other fruits were grown, although not to the
same extent, and there were lanes and thickets of cob-nut, which I was
told is a very profitable commodity, if you have it, but the bushes had
failed to bear that season. In view of the growing popularity of
vegetarianism, to the charms of which I yielded myself in England, when
I found how satisfactorily you could be fed by those who knew how to
work the system properly, I advised the sister fruit-farmers to make
more of a point of nuts; this was when they mourned sadly over the
market price of apples in a good year. I told them how I had spent a
week with vegetarians, expecting to be starved, and had been nourished
on such rich non-flesh meats that I hardly cared to look at a boiled
chicken when I went on to the next house. "Nuts," said I, "that can give
you all the feeling of beef and mutton without the gross actuality, have
a great future before them. So make haste and start growing them before
the other fruit-farmers think of it."
The conformation of this Kentish orchard gave charming views of its
several parts, of the pretty, down-dropping village and the distant
landscape. There was a slope of applefield, flushed with the colour of
its massed fruit in the sun, which sank to a lake with swans on it, on
the far side of which an old mill dipped its wheel in the water; trees
rose steeply behind the mill, and sweet old houses out of the trees. It
was the top of hilly ridges of which the bottom was the famous
Weald--and a subject for a painter if ever there was one. When I had
walked about enough I visited the warehouses and hop kilns that walled
the yard; saw F. wading in her sea of graded apples, directing the
workmen whose only overseer she was; stood with C. in an empty oast
house, while she reconstructed the busy scenes that were no more, the
living functions of the idle furnace and flue, shoot and press, and told
tales of a childhood beginning to loom away towards the fairyland where
now my own abides. "We used to bring potatoes here, and the hop-dryer
would bake them for us in the hot ashes"--alas! But why should I say
alas? I am convinced--although I was not always convinced--that it is
not a matter for repining that we "live but once."
The Maidstone carriage awaited the completion of an early lunch, and for
nearly four hours of the lovely afternoon C. showed me the lovely
country. I wish there were more adjectives equivalent to "lovely" and
"beautiful," that I might not have to use those two so often; but I must
express my feelings, and it is not my fault that the language of tongue
and pen is so limited. Everything was lovely, and there is no other word
for it but beautiful. I had not been to Devonshire then, but I still
think the village of Linton, as I saw it in that weather, beyond
compare. Not knowing what a Torquay horse could do, I wondered that ours
did not take the hill in what seemed the easier way of sliding down it
on his haunches; his labour on my account (but when he struggled upward
again, by digging his toes into the cobbles provided for the purpose, I
walked) was the only drawback to my almost intoxicating enjoyment of
England on that day. I had never before seen the country save from the
windows of trains, except in the eastern counties. The charms of English
hills and dales were fresh. Not that that made any difference in their
effect on me. I cannot believe for a moment that familiarity with such
beauty could ever lessen the joy of it.
On the brow of Linton Hill I got out to look at the church. I am not,
strictly speaking, a churchy person--this being, perhaps, one of the
cases where familiarity runs its normal course--but these English
reliquaries, with their histories and their architecture, had a
fascination that drew me every time I saw a door open. I ran in alone,
as I liked to do, while C. reposed in the carriage, conserving her
strength, and the poor horse pulled himself together for the descent;
and I looked through the chancel screening to that chapel of the
Cornwallis tombs, to be almost startled by the white image of death and
peace lying there, in cold and cloistered privacy, while without the sun
shone so gloriously, and the happy living people basked and played and
busied themselves in it, still possessing their lovely world. It was a
sharply impressive thing, coming upon such a conjunction unawares.
By the way, I may as well say here that I took no notes of my English
experiences at the time of happening, having no idea of writing a book
about them, and I may sometimes mix things up. But I think I am certain
that it was Linton Church and the Cornwallis monument and this first
drive in Kent that went together.
Down that inexpressible village street we drove, past those dreams of
old houses--labourers' cottages, as likely as not--which made my mouth
water in envy of the labourers, who doubtless scorned them as out of
fashion; and then there opened to us the Weald of Kent.
Perhaps I had better not begin upon the Weald of Kent. For one thing, it
has been mentioned by other writers--and painters. We have a picture of
it in our own Public Gallery in Melbourne. But, O paint! O words!
We meandered about high-hedged, lane-like, tree-shaded roads, which
would have reminded me of Devonshire if I had been there first. We
climbed the--to the horse with a big landau behind him--awful Hunton
Hill (up which I walked). We passed Hunton Park, Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman's old home, or one of them. We called on a friend who
gave us tea--_tea_--of a deliciousness commensurate with the craving for
it induced by so much fresh air. We skirted many hopfields, in their
full late-summer dress. We----
But if I go further I shall be violating the sanctities of private life
by discovering to the public the nest that for the time being sheltered
me. Suffice it that that drive was one of the drives of my life.
Our neighbouring town of Maidstone was closely investigated, as a
matter of course. That perfect example of a sixteenth-century
manor-house which is now the Museum, the far older Archbishop's Palace,
magnificent All Saints' Church, and the relics of the historic past in
back streets and byways, filled several afternoons with joy. But the
country, in that sweetest weather--we did have rain and cold sometimes,
but the best was always with me when I wanted it--the outdoor loveliness
was the soul-saturating delight. Until as late in the year as I made my
last visit this blessed luck held out. In the little pocket-book which
contains the brief and only record of my movements at this time, I find
the proof that memory is not drawing upon imagination:
"Oct. 30th.--Another gorgeous day, mild, sunny, summery ..."
"Oct. 31st.--Another fine day, although dull in the morning ..."
"Nov. 1st.--Beautiful day ..."
"Nov. 2nd.--Another lovely day ..."
"Nov. 3rd.--Another lovely day. Slightly foggy ..."
"Nov. 4th.--Still lovely, after the usual foggy dawn ..."
And then I think of the sort of weather they had in England the year
before and the year after and bear in mind the sort of weather that an
Australian is accustomed to!
It was on the 29th October that I went into Kent for the second and last
time. That was the occasion when my other sixpenny porter failed me by
putting me in the wrong carriage of my train, whereby I found myself at
Rochester when C. was waiting for me at Maidstone. When I reached her
house (to hear that she was still abroad searching for me) or, rather,
when we met at last at the compensating tea-table, and I had leisure of
mind to appreciate my surroundings, I thought Kent even lovelier than in
the month of hop and apple harvest. My room was abloom with roses from
C.'s garden (Madame Abel Chatney is, if I remember rightly, the name of
the shaded pink beauty that made so brave a show), and a vase of the
blue plumbago that riots like a wild thing in our Australian midsummer
heat, but was here coddled in her greenhouse, displayed itself
conspicuously on the chimney-piece to "remind me of home." The trees
were yellowing and their leaves dropping gently, but the woods had not
taken on their full colouring of decay as yet. The mistiness of the soft
mornings only made the sunshine (and the breakfast fire in the little
morning-room) the sweeter when it shone out.
It was on the "gorgeous day," 30th October, that we went to Malling
Abbey.
Another of those villages or little country towns whose charms must
inevitably be lost upon those who have always known them. There are
houses in Malling (and I found them plentiful elsewhere) standing close
upon the street--plain, flat-fronted, absolutely unpretentious, but
genuine, dignified, high-bred, if one may use the term, in every inch of
them--before which I stood in admiration that I am sure no home-staying
English person could understand. Are they the real Queen Anne? Whatever
they are they are good taste materialised. And if I could choose a
home----
But no; on second thoughts, no--not in an English village or little
town, all its loveliness notwithstanding. It is strange that for
thirty-eight years the daydream of my partner and myself--an
English-bred colonial clergyman's idea of mundane bliss--was just that
life; to be "settled" in one of those peaceful and comfortable country
rectories such as that in which we began our joint career. It seems to
be his dream still, but it is no longer mine. When, on the third Sunday,
after our return we walked through the fields and lanes to morning
service at W----, and entered the village church (to be stared at by the
rustic congregation with as much curiosity as when I wore my wedding
bonnet and G. his first canonicals); and when after service we were
invited, although we did not stay, to luncheon at the rectory, and saw
the house which was our first home, and walked upon the lawn where we
played croquet with the young friends who came to see us in our bridal
retirement, now all old like us, or dead and gone--it came over me to
wonder how it would have been if we had had our hearts' desire and
stayed there or in a like place always. I thought of the living life
that had been mine, and shuddered inwardly. So I did whenever I looked
upon a pretty parsonage house distant from railways and centres of
intellectual activity--and I saw so many of them; my first thought was:
"Oh, what a sweet home I could have made of this!" My swiftly following
second: "What appalling loneliness!" Somehow a bush hut in the Back
Blocks does not suggest such isolation for a cultivated mind and a
spirit awake to the movements of the world as these stately rectories
and vicarages in the small villages of England. One suspects it is not
easy to keep awake in them. But I may be wrong.
At Malling Abbey it was still more forcibly borne in upon me how I had
grown away from the attitudes of my youth.
The glorious old place--the eleventh-century tower has for its base the
foundations of a Saxon church, that is nothing for England--now belongs
to, or is occupied by, a community of nuns and their priest-chaplain;
English Benedictines is the correct label for them, I believe. The only
members of the household not too sacred for the common use of visitors
were the lay-women, and even they could not take us across the line
separating the earth and floors allowed to unconsecrated feet from the
precincts trodden by the Mother Superior and her nuns. The rooms they
occupied we could not see--not for love or money (and we dropped no mean
donation into the box displayed in the neutral vestibule); nor their
chapel, although the priest's chapel was shown to us. A late Mother
Superior had been more indulgent to the respectful curiosity of the
wayfarer, but the present Mother was "very strict," we were told. So we
did not so much as catch a glimpse of sacerdotal raiment, except that of
the priest taking the place of the absent chaplain--austere in his caped
cassock and biretta--and the Sister who had once been the sweet-maker,
and who dropped in to see her successor, who was her own sister, while
we were with the latter--a pleasant girl, with whom C. had an
acquaintance, and who was a charming hostess to us.
She worked very hard--for love, plus board and lodging--at the making of
the sweets (in Australian parlance, lollies) which were an important
source of revenue to the community. She made them in large quantities
and of high quality, and they had a steady sale amongst those who knew
of them, the high church aristocracy being the "connection" chiefly. C.
and I, both interested in fine cookery, had a great time in her
workroom, filled and lined with the materials, appliances and finished
products of her vicarious trade. She showed us everything without any
professional reserve or personal pride, explaining over and over again
that she had not the genius of the sister she had superseded. The sister
had been the famous sweet-maker; her humble self had taken, but could
not fill, that expert's place. But the expert had put on the habit of
the Order, and "When you have to go to church seven times a day, you
have no time for sweet-making," said our lay friend, unconscious of the
meanings borne by her words to a life-taught, world-taught listener.
When the sweet-maker who had entered the Sisterhood, which, so far as I
could learn, had no definite occupation except to pray and meditate,
lingered for a minute at her old cooking-table, looking on at the really
arduous labours of her successor, there was no evidence in her demeanour
of any doubt as to which of the two stood on the higher plane.
Well, I was even as these dear, dense women when I was young. I wanted
(at about the age of seventeen) to go into a sisterhood and say prayers
all day instead of living my life. And I was so morally undeveloped, so
intellectually juvenile, as to believe that I would thereby be
performing a noble, if not even the noblest, deed. Supposing I had not
been shaken out of my groove--the old hereditary groove, so deeply worn
that one does not see over the edges unless one is pushed up--where
should I have been now? I asked myself the question at Malling Abbey,
standing between the Mary in the black gown and white wimple and the
Martha making fondu with all her might, and the answers of a startled
imagination sent cold chills adown my spine.
Our unemancipated, unappreciated Martha was quite delightful to us. The
proud Marys would not let us near them, but she did all she could to
serve and oblige us--she and the dear old housekeeper of the chaplain,
who, in her reverend lord's absence and out of the human kindness of her
heart, stretched a point to please a stranger from so far, and allowed
me to peep into the home he had made in the ancient gatehouse; an
austerely and appropriately appointed one as ever I saw, but suggesting,
oh, what a life for a man with his manhood in him! The sweet-maker not
only gave us sweets and the secrets of their manufacture, she took
chairs for us into the abbey grounds, that we might take our picnic
luncheon in comfort; not, of course, in the garden, for the nuns walked
there, but beside a pond with willow-trees--a typical bit of convent
ground which I seemed to have visited in a previous existence. As we ate
our sandwiches, and viewed through sylvan veils the grey jumble of the
ancient buildings and the new but not discordant Guest House
incorporated with them, the Twentieth Century and its works seemed very
far away.
I think it was the chaplain's housekeeper who showed us the Pilgrims'
Bath--a place of weird suggestions. It is a stone outhouse hidden in
trees, and containing a sunk stone tank, with stone steps going down
into it. Here, in the bygone ages, the pilgrims washed themselves, or
were washed, before entering the sacred precincts. The cistern was empty
now, and there was no apparatus for taking water out of it. In those
pre-hygienic days ... However, it was interesting to know that washing
was done at all.
The Guest House looked the abode of peace. It takes in lady boarders,
for the pecuniary benefit of the community--which, if it does not work
for its living, must still be supported somehow--and how I would have
loved to be one, if I had stayed in my groove! Even as it was, the sweet
seclusion and simplicity and refinement of the life fascinated me
intensely. But the Guest House is presided over by a "Guest Mistress,"
and liberty is the basis of peace, as of all forms of happiness--to me.
She may be a darling, but I could not stand her now. The guests will all
have to be women of the Church and not of the world, souls in steady
grooves of tradition from which they have never been shaken out. To
them, if they are tired, it should be an ideal place of rest. One thing
I wish I had asked the sweet-maker: Are they allowed to worship in the
nuns' chapel? Surely not, if we were not permitted even to look at it.
In the priest's chapel, then? That seems too small, and I think I saw no
seat for a congregation of more than two--his housekeeper and under
maid. Perhaps the paying guests are sent to the parish church. But
suppose the rector of Malling (I know nothing of him) should be an
Evangelical? One thing is certain. They will have to go to church
somewhere, and to go often.
For nearly a thousand years the tower of this old abbey has stood where
it now stands, and who knows for how many years the Saxon church which
laid its foundations stood there before it? As I looked up at its lofty
broken crown, and down and around upon the structures beneath it, I
thought how many things beside stone walls outlive their time and use
and meaning.
On 1st November--a "beautiful day"--we went to Sutton Vallance. November
was the month of departure, and this, the last of my country excursions,
was peculiarly interesting and memorable. For at Sutton Vallance my
beloved godmother, the eldest aunt, had lived for some years, and in the
graveyard of the parish church she lies--carried there by her last wish
when she died in London. In girlhood I had wanted to visit her at this
place, and had not been able; after her death I made a promise to myself
that I would keep tryst with her dear ghost at the Kentish graveside
some day, if ever I got the chance.
It was not for that, however, that the expedition to Sutton Vallance was
planned. The claims of life came foremost, and it was life, not death,
that called us thither, a set of circumstances to which I gladly yielded
precedence over any affair of mine.
To C. and her sister came, the day before, two friends from the West
Indies, a pleasant man and wife. They represented old families of their
island, and his had the custom of colonial gentlefolk, the world over,
of sending their sons home to be educated. He was himself an "old boy"
of Sutton Vallance Grammar School, as I think he said his father had
been, and as he intended his own sons to be in due course. He was
delightedly revisiting England after years of absence--from fifteen to
twenty, perhaps--and to him the heart of England was this village above
the Weald and the old buildings that crowned it. We went to Sutton
Vallance that he might report himself to his old Headmaster, still in
harness, and show his wife the studies and dormitories, prayer-room and
playing grounds, where he had lived his schoolboy life, and where her
children would live theirs in the days to come. We had the landau from
Maidstone again, and set forth a party of five; if we had been a party
of a hundred instead, I do not think another member of it could have
entered into his feelings as I did. In the sympathy engendered by the
similarity of our circumstances, I enjoyed the afternoon, I am sure, as
much as he did--the neglected grave notwithstanding.
We passed it--the churchyard where I knew it was--while he was eagerly
identifying each little feature of the road as the scene of some
schoolboy prank or other; he spoke of the path beside which my dear one
lay, to describe the order in which the school was marched to
church--"through that gate ... in at that door"--and I did not bring
upon the living brightness of his hour a suggestion of the shadows that
would fall all too soon in any case.
The 1st of November was a Sunday. His time in England, like mine, was
short, and this was the only day available for the momentous visit. It
had to be now, or perhaps never. So, when we reached the school,
temporary disappointments were encountered. The Headmaster was out. So
was the only under master left of the old staff. The strange matron and
some elder boys, deeply interested in a guest with such credentials,
did what they could to repair the loss, and he played host to his wife
and us. It was delightful to observe and to listen to him as he rummaged
over the place; to hear him and the matron instructing each other in the
differences between Then and Now; to see him with his old boy's hand on
the young boys' shoulders--"you fellows"--telling them what Sybarites
they were with their hot water laid on, and inquiring of them how the
sporting credit of the old shop stood in comparison with that of rival
schools. I am afraid it was found that the old shop had fallen from
grace in some particulars; the mother of the boys who were to go there
in a few years was certainly critical, and I had seen schools as big
that were better ordered in my own country overseas; but it was full of
interest, plus precious associations, for me as for him, and that was
distinctly a "happy day"--happy for me, the neglected grave
notwithstanding; while as for him, I prophesy that in his old age he
will look back upon it as one of the happiest of his life.
It would hardly have been that without a sight of his old Headmaster.
And when we had quite "done" the school, and were down on the street
where our carriage waited, an inward reluctance to make an end just
there was felt by all, and resulted in suggestions calculated to give
the Headmaster another chance. The hour was late, we were far from home,
and--_we had had no tea_. F. proposed that we should forage in the
village for our evening meal. I demurred on behalf of C. and the secret
weaknesses. C. said the night air would do her no harm inside the
carriage, and that she would wind a scarf over her mouth. Then F. named
a local house of entertainment. "No, no," said our Old Boy, "you must
come with me to the old tuck shop"--which in the palmy days, it seemed,
had been good for every comforting kind of meal. This we did. The old
tuck shop was found to be in its old place, unchanged; even the old
proprietor (who looked ninety) and his old wife (who still looked young)
were there; they and the Old Boy all but fell into each other's arms. We
were shown into an inner parlour, a table was swiftly spread and piled
with good things, including a sufficient teapot; and we four ladies
rested and refreshed ourselves in great content. The Old Boy dodged in
and out, snatching a cake or a slice of bread-and-butter, returning to
talk with his old friends, reappearing for a gulp of tea and to gaze
ardently out of the unblinded window adown the darkening street. Anon we
saw him through that same window sprinting as for his life after a
vanishing bicycle. When he came back, in about half-an-hour, it was to
express his satisfaction at having caught, made himself known to, and
had a nice chat with, the remaining under master. So night closed around
us, and the great hope of the day was given up.
Suddenly, as we were all sitting together, about to summon our coachman,
who had also had his tea, there was a stir outside, the door of our
parlour was impetuously flung open, and a tall old man strode in, at
sight of whom the Old Boy sprang to his feet with an inarticulate grunt
of joy.
I felt that it was a meeting we should not have witnessed, but it was
good to witness it. The swift interchange of words told what their
relations in the past had been, but the tones of voice, the glow of
eyes, the grip of hands, still more. I could not easily forget the face
of the younger man when he said he had sons for the old school, nor the
face of the elder taking that tribute of filial loyalty. In the gap of
years lay the grave of the Headmaster's wife, and he was not destined to
train up another generation; the Old Boy was a strong and useful man of
the world, come into his inheritance of all that a boy of the right sort
grows up for. He introduced his wife. The stress of repressed emotion
was relieved. Would we not all come back and dine with him, the
Headmaster asked. He begged us to do so, but we could not. Then would we
all come back and dine with him to-morrow? Again we could not. The Old
Boy's business of life compelled his return to London next morning. So
the great occasion passed. The Headmaster gripped hands again, and
returned to the school which would be ever the dearer to him for these
few minutes out of it; and the Old Boy stood amongst us visibly
transfigured, like Moses just down from the Mount.
"_Now,_" said he intensely, "do you wonder at my wanting to come back to
my old school?"
Subdued and thoughtful and silent, we drove home. Moonlight and fog wove
the veil of evening through which glimmered the headstones of the
churchyard as we went by. There was not time now to stop the carriage
and pay my own tribute to the past and dear. Already C. was too late,
and there was not light to distinguish one grave from another. Well, it
did not matter whether I stood over my beloved one's coffined dust or
looked from a few yards' distance at the dim grass covering it. That
which haunted the spot was just as close to me.
There were three more days--"another lovely day," when my husband came
to fetch me; and yet "another lovely day, slightly foggy," when we took
him to Maidstone to show him the sights that I had seen; and one that
was "still lovely, after the usual foggy dawn," which was November the
4th, and our last in Kent.
But these were days when C.'s thoughts and mine were not concentrated
upon the pleasures and businesses in hand--when the blue plumbago in my
bedroom was not needed for any purpose but to look lovely against the
wall. November was the month of departure. In another fortnight I was to
be upon the sea. Towards the sea and the south my face was set, and she
knew what it was I looked for. All the charms of Kent in the golden
weather could not now deflect my gaze. England is Home indeed to the
English-born. The dear world in every part is Home to the spirit that
loves life and freedom, and discerns no frontiers between nation and
nation, nor barriers between man and man. But there is one wee spot, one
house amongst the countless millions of human dwellings--no matter in
what hole or corner you have tucked it--that is the only place on earth,
or in the universe for that matter, where your heart, if it be a
mother's heart, can rest.