I quite forgot Marston Moor in my self-gratulation and my recognition
of the civility from every one which had so ineffectively abetted my
search. Simple and gentle, how hospitable they had all been to my vain
inquiry, and how delicately they had forborne to visit the stranger
with the irony of the average American who is asked anything, especially
anything he does not know! I went thinking that the difference was a
difference between human nature long mellowed to its conditions, and
human nature rasped on its edges and fretted by novel circumstances to a
provisional harshness. I chose to fancy that unhuman nature sympathized
with the English mood; in the sheep bleating from the pastures I heard
the note of Wordsworth’s verse; and by the sky, hung in its low
blue with rough, dusky clouds, I was canopied as with a canvas of
Constable’s.
It was the more pity, then, that at the station a shooting party,
approaching from the other quarter with their servants and guns and
dogs, and their bags of hares and partridges, should have given English
life another complexion to the wanderer so willing to see it always
rose color. The gunners gained the station platform first, and at once
occupied the benches, strewing all the vacant places with their still
bleeding prey. I did not fail of the opportunity to see in them the
arrogance of class, which I had hitherto so vainly expected, and I
disabled their looks by finding them as rude as their behavior. How
different they were from the kind bicycler, or the gentleman in the
dog-cart, or either one of the farm-wives who sorrowed so civilly not to
know where my lost battle-field was!
In England, it is always open to the passenger to enforce a claim to
his share of the public facilities, but I chose to go into the licensed
victualler’s next the station and sit down to a peaceable cup of tea
rather than contest a place on that bloody benching; and so I made the
acquaintance of an interior out of literature, such as my beloved Thomas
Hardy likes to paint. On a high-backed rectangular settle rising against
the wall, and almost meeting in front of the comfortable range, sat a
company of rustics, stuffing themselves with cold meat, washed down with
mugs of ale, and cozily talking. They gained indefinitely in my interest
from being served by a lame woman, with a rhythmical limp, and I hope it
was not for my demerit that I was served apart in the chillier parlor,
when I should have liked so much to stay and listen to the rustic tale
or talk. The parlor was very depressingly papered, but on its walls I
had the exalted company of his Majesty the King, their Royal Highnesses
the Prince and Princess of Wales, the late Premier, the Marquis of
Salisbury, and, for no assignable reason except a general fitness for
high society, the twelve Apostles in Da Vinci’s _Last Supper_, together
with an appropriate view of York Minster.