As to the unconscious subject of comment and curiosity, Miss Ruth
Adgate,--Miss Adgate was ecstatic. Her heart in its rapture wanted to,
did, engulf the house, and the land and the hill, and the inmates of
the Old Adgate place, and the entire town of Oldbridge. Something new,
something strange had indeed happened for her joy had begun to bubble
and ferment from the moment her foot passed the threshold of the house.
No--from the hour the train, on its sideline to Oldbridge, had begun to
move beside the river, bearing her for thirty minutes from one little
way-station to another.
The sentiment of an autumnal New England landscape spread beneath clean
thoughtless blue skies,--vistas of grey rocks and sedges by the river at
the one hand,--where the dark green savins, reminding her of cypresses
in Italy, sprang through the grey clefts;--and across the river, hills,
low, wooded, interspersed with green and brown and orange
pastures, through which cropped the same venerable grey New England
rock,--harmonious and austere,--this perspective, enchanting in its
tonic beauty, was grievously, alas! debased and disfigured.
Ignoble little wooden packing cases liberally dotted by the way screamed
with the crudest colours, 'the crudest rainbow scale disgorges on the
palate.' Gigantic hoardings, flaunting ridiculous local remedies and
foods for every prevalent disease or dyspeptic stomach insolently
stared at one;--the very backs and sides of barns and packing cases were
decorated with their insignia!
“They need a Thames Conservancy, a County Council, something,” Ruth
protested to her outraged sense of beauty, “to save this splendid river,
control such unpuritanical abandonments to colour and commerce.”
Miss Adgate, you perceive, was naïvely confident--oh, serene British
confidence! that taste governs the world, that the world rays and rules
so soon as the world discovers it is acting in bad taste.
But these blemishes were, after all, insignificant affairs--details
incidental to an untutored modern public. What Miss Adgate's inward
vision vividly perceived through the windows of the shabby long car with
its soiled velvet cushions, and air of unworldliness,--which pleased
her,--its smell of stale apples and anthracite coal smoke which didn't
please her,--was the _land_. The land without a flaw of commerce! Hidden
lives that took her blood back three hundred years, led her imagination.
Undeniably, the effect of this country was not one of abundance....
It was not varied and enhanced by a thousand fair human touches;
the neglected land was uncouthly rough.... Nor was it in the least
suggestive of the poetry, art, emotion,--the loves, the hates--of
nineteen hundred vanished sumptuous years. (One might have likened it
rather to the starved and simple beggar-maid waiting for the King.)
But it was hers, it was _hers!_... She was _of it!_... Miss Adgate was
deliciously cognisant that this fact filled her heart to overflowing
with sweet content.
“This land saw my forbears!... This land for three hundred years gave
them all they asked of life.... It opened its heart to them, therefore
I love it, therefore I love it!” she repeated softly to herself. “And if
this elation is patriotism--the mere patriotism dubbed Reflex Egotism by
the cynics,--well--poor dears! What dear poor dears the cynics be!”
Miss Ruth Adgate gave a pleased sigh and turned her eyes again upon the
view. They fell upon a bit of grey rock, a group of savins and scarlet
barberry bushes loitering beside a piece of water... a composition Diaz
would have thankfully imprinted, for reproduction, on his retina. The
little pool, from brink to brink, coyly reflected these and the clear
blue sky, and in the foreground twenty feet of hoarding bore the legend:
“Try Grandpa Luther's Syrup of Winter-green for your Baby's Tantrums.”
Ruth fell back with rather a rueful laugh.