Every here and there between the shops in the High Street is a
house that has survived the request--it never amounts to a demand
in Mallingham--for “business premises.” Quite unpretentious is the
appearance of all these houses, but the front door opens upon a hall
that is a hall, and not a mere passage to a narrow staircase. Admirably
proportioned rooms are to be found on every floor, and usually a door at
the farther end of the hall admits one to a garden, and not a mere patch
of green. Here are gardens that have been cultivated for hundreds of
years and so artfully designed that each of them has the appearance of a
park, with lawns, and terraces, and pergolas. Here, not thirty feet
back from the street, are acres of orchard, with mulberry trees of the
original stock introduced by James I. to make possible his scheme of
English silk weaving. The arbutus has also a home in several of
these surprising pleasure grounds, with several other rare but fully
acclimatised flowering shrubs. Shady walks among giant lilacs and
laburnums lead to banks of roses and beds of lilies, and hardy borders
of brilliant colour such as a stranger could never fancy might be found
in so unpromising a region.
The lucky residents in these wonderful houses are usually extremely
exclusive--if they were not so, goodness only knows what might happen.
When a lady of good family finds herself living next door to a grocer
and an ironmonger, she is bound to take steps to prevent the possibility
of any one fancying that she belongs to that _galère_, and the steps
that some of them take with this fact in their mind are sometimes very
diverting. They usually assume the form of ignoring the existence,
not so much of the grocer and the ironmonger as of the other ladies
similarly situated. If you call upon Miss Wheatly at No. 10 High Street
and, after praising up her garden, refer to the garden of Miss Keightley
at No. 20, Miss Wheatley will express great interest, saying she has
often heard that Miss Keightley's garden is quite charming, but she
has never seen it for herself. Miss Keightley on her side may go
even further, and not merely pretend that she has never heard of Miss
Wheatley's garden, but also that she had no idea that any one named
Wheatley lived in the town. This is at first, but she occasionally
betrays a scrupulous anxiety to be accurate by asking, “What did you say
the name was? Wheatley? Oh yes, to be sure I remember hearing the other
day that a Miss Wheatley lived at No. 10. And you say she has a nice
garden?”
And these good ladies may have been living within a few doors of one
another for forty odd years, and the father of the one may have been in
the butter trade, while the father of the other was in eggs.
The social distinctions in a country town such as Mallingham are
sometimes very pathetic. It might be thought that the people would find
a bond of union in that illiteracy which they enjoy in common, or in
that profound ignorance of everything connected, however distantly, with
art or science in which they live from one end of the year to the other;
but one does not find it so. Mallingham is perhaps the most ill-informed
town in England on all matters pertaining to culture, whether literary
or artistic. A stranger who was unacquainted with this fact thought he
was scoring a point in a speech which he had been called on to make in
the absence of the Member for the Division at the annual banquet of
the Barham Trust--the most important incident of the winter in
Mallingham--when he remarked that he felt that the town must be the
centre of the greatest literary activity; for, motoring through the High
Street, he found on one of the shop signs the name Swift, on another
the name Smollett, a little farther on he came upon an Addison (great
applause), and finally he found himself close to the house of Hume.
Surely, he said, these names spoke for themselves.
They had need to, for none of the élite of Mailingham could speak for
any of them, except Addison, for Mr. Addison was a pork butcher, who the
day before had been elected a member of the Corporation, after a hard
struggle with a saddler. It so happened that the bearers of all the
other literary names were not applaudable people--two of them were
definitely unpopular--but the name of Mr. Addison was received with
cheers, not by reason of his connection with _The Spectator_, but simply
because of his recent achievement, and no one at the banquet had the
least idea what the orator was referring to in bringing forward that
string of names. “He might surely have mentioned Mr. Fawley, who was
twice Mayor, or George Hanson, who has just bought the saw mills,” a
prominent burgess remarked to me when I was in his shop the next day.
“But what has Peter Swift done, or Tom Smollett, or even Walter
Hume? Decent enough men, I don't deny, but out of place when named in
prominence at the Barham Banquet.”
I never met anyone in the town who had heard these names in any other
connection than that of Mailingham shopkeepers.
Some time later a new curate at St Bartholomew's, when proposing a vote
of thanks to the chairman of one of his social meetings (with a magic
lantern and an amateur ventriloquist), became erudite and droll by
referring to “what Dr. Johnson said about music.” The next day one
of the churchwardens--a land agent--asked him how on earth he could
attribute such a sentiment to Dr. Johnson. “I knew Dr. Johnson as well
as most people, and there never was a man in the town who enjoyed a
song better or knew better what a good song was,” he said; and when the
perplexed curate recovered himself sufficiently to be able to explain
that there was another Dr. Johnson who said things besides the person of
the same name who had once enjoyed quite a large and lucrative practice
as a fully qualified veterinary surgeon at Mallingham, the churchwarden
smiled and shook his head. “As much as to say,” the clergyman added in
telling me the story--“as much as to say that my excuse was far from
plausible, but that he would accept it to prevent the matter going
farther.”
That narrative I found to be beautifully typical of the literary
erudition of Mallingham.