After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly
have expected any livelier appeal to my American pride, and yet it came,
one day, when I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing
our windows were the vehicles bearing to some public function the
members of the British Chautauqua. How far the name and idea of
Chautauqua have since spread there is no saying, but it was the last
of our national inventions which I should have expected to find in
Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture was reasonably in its line, and the
Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with the summer conferences held
beside our lovely up-State lake. The British Chautauqua, as I saw it,
was a group of people from all parts of the United Kingdom joined in the
pursuit of improvement and enjoyment, and they were now here on one of
their summer outings. They had been invited to a gentleman’s place not
far from Aberystwyth to view as indubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail
as now exists, and it was my very good fortune through the kind offices
of that friend of ours to be invited with them.
It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort commoner on the
western Welsh coast than on other shores of the “rainy isles,” but
not too common even there; and we drove out of the town through the
prettiest country of hillside fields and valleys opening to the sea,
on a road that was fairly dusty in the hot sun. There were cottages,
grouped and detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and blue slate
roofs, and in places the children ran out from them with mercenary
offerings of flowers and song, or with frank pleas for charity direct. I
yielded with reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester economist in
my carriage, and denied them, when I would so much rather have abetted
them in their wicked attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still
that they had voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the children who used
to chase our wheels in Italy, and I have no doubt they deserved quite as
well of us as those did.
I got back my spirits when we left our carriages, and I found myself
walking up a pleasant avenue of wilding trees, with a young Chautauquan
from Australia who looked as if he might be a young Chautauquan from
Alabama, tall, and lean, and brown. We fell into talk about the trees,
and he said how they differed in their green from the sombre gray of his
native forests; and then he, from that vast far continent of his, spoke
of the little island where we were, as Home. That has always a strange
effect for us self-outcasts from the great British roof, and whether it
makes us smile, or makes us sigh, it never fails to startle us when we
hear it from colonial lips. The word holds in common kindness Canada and
India and South Africa and Australia, and it has its pathos in the fact
that the old mother of these mighty children seems to leave solely to
them the tenderness that draws them to her in that notion of home.
V
There were about fifty of those British Chautauquans, and when they had
ranged themselves on the grass before the shrubbery of a pleasant lawn,
backed by a wooded slope, the dignified lady of the house came out with
a casket in her hand, and put it on a table, and the exercises began.
Fitly, if the casket really held the sacred relic, they began with
prayer; then a Welsh soloist followed with a hymn, but whether she
sang in Welsh or English, I do not remember; I am only sure she sang
divinely; and then came the speeches. The first of the speeches was by
our friend, who was the local Unitarian minister, and of a religious
body not inconsiderable in that Calvinistic Wales. He told us how the
Holy Grail had been deposited with the monks of Strata Florida, the
famous old abbey near Aberystwyth; but I forgot who made them this
trust, unless it was King Arthur’s knights, and I am not sure whether
the fact is matter of legend or history. What I remember is that when
the abbey was suppressed by Henry VIII., certain of the escaping monks
came with the relic to the gentle house where we then were, and placed
it in the keeping of the family who have guarded it ever since.
[Illustration: ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS]
After our friend, the lady of this house took up the tale, and told in
words singularly choice and simple the story of the sacred relic as the
family knew it. I had only once before heard a woman speak, no less a
woman than our great and dear Julia Ward Howe, and it seemed to me
that she spoke better than any man; and I must say of the Chautauquans’
hostess, that day, that if ever the Englishwomen come into their full
political rights, as they seem sure to do, the traditions of good
sense and good taste in English public speaking will not pass, but
will prosper on through their orators. There were touches of poetry,
nationally Welsh, in what she said, and touches of humor perhaps
personally Welsh. It seems that the cup had been famed throughout the
countryside for the miraculous property by which whoever drank from it
was cured of his or her malady, and it had been passed freely round to
all sufferers ever since it came into her family’s keeping. That they
might make doubly sure of the miracle, it was the custom of the sick
not only to empty the cup, but to nibble a little bit of the wood, and
swallow that, so that in whatever state the monks of Strata Florida had
confided it, the vessel was now in the state we saw. Saying this the
lady opened the casket holding it, and showed us the crescent-shaped rim
of a wooden bowl, about the bigness of a cocoanut shell; all the rest
had been consumed by the pious sufferers whom it had restored to health.
I am sorry, after all, to own that this cup is said by some authorities
not to be the Holy Grail, but a vessel like it carved out of the true
cross. But even so subordinate a relic is priceless, and as it is no
longer possible to drink from it, we may hope that the fragment will
remain indefinitely to after time. When they had wondered at the sight
of it the Chautauquans and their friend were made free of the charming
seventeenth-century house, which would be old for this country, but
which in the taste of that time was rather modern, and looked like the
casino of some Italian villa. It abounded, as such houses in England do,
in the pictured faces of the past, and in the memorials which only the
centuries can leave behind them, but was too graceful to seem rich. “A
home of ancient peace,” it looked, in its mild gray stone amidst its
lawns and shrubberies, the larger hold of the gardens and pleasaunces
through which the Chautauquans followed from it.