touch of the absent cypresses? We came suddenly upon the ruin, and with
little parley at the porter’s lodge where they charge admittance and
sell photographs, we stood within its densely ivied walls, the broken
arches beetling overhead, and the tall trees repairing their defect with
a leafless tracery showing fine against a gray sky hesitating blue, and
the pale sun filtering a wet silver through the clouds. In places the
architecture still kept its gracious lines of Gothic or Norman design;
there were whole breadths of wall to testify of the beauty and majesty
that had been, and where walls were marred or shattered, the ivy had
bound up their wounds, or tufts of soft foliage distracted the eye from
their wrongs. Underfoot the damp grass was starred with the earliest
flowers of spring, violets, celandine, primrose; and among the flocks of
pigeons that made their homes in the holes of the masonry left by the
rotting joists, the golden-billed English blackbirds fluttered and sang.
You could trace the whole shape of the edifice, and see it almost as it
once stood, but the ivy which holds it up is also pulling it down. The
decay seems mostly from the winds and rains, and the insidious malice of
vegetation, but men have aided from time to time in the destruction,
though not without the censure of their fellow-men. It is told, indeed,
that a purchaser of the ruin, two hundred years ago, was so wrought upon
by the blame of his friends when he wished to use its hallowed stone for
other building, that he began to dream of his own death by a keystone
falling from one of the arches he was destroying; his death actually
happened, though it was a heavy timber, and not a stone that crushed
him. Everything in the neighborhood of the ruin was in keeping with it:
a baronial mansion among the woods of an adjoining hill, villas within
their shrubbery, and when we came to drive back to the ferry, many
pleasant farms and pretty cottages behind their hedges of holly and
whitethorn. An unusual number of these were thatched, in the tradition
of rustic roofs which is slowly, though very slowly, dying out. The
machine-threshed straw is so broken that it does not make a good thatch,
and the art of the thatcher is passing with the quality of his material.
Still we saw some new thatches, with occasionally an old one so rotten
that it must have been full of the vermin which such shelters collect,
and which could have walked away with it. Now and then we met country
people on our way, looking rather sallow and lean, but our driver,
perhaps from his contact with town-bred luxury, had a face of the right
purple, and here and there was a rustic visage of the rich,
south-of-England color showing warm in the pale sunset light.
When we had seen Netley Abbey, all the rest of the Southampton region
was left rather impoverished of the conventional touristic interest, but
any friend of man could still find abundant pleasure in it by mounting a
tram-top and riding far out towards the Itchen, along winding streets of
low brick houses, each with its little garden at the front or side, and
with its hedge of evergreen. Often these kindly looking homes were
overhung by almond-trees, palely pink, in bloom, and sometimes when they
were more pretentious, though they were never arrogant, they stood
apart, all planted round with shrubs and trees, like the dwellings in
Hartford. The tram’s course was largely through umbrageous avenues, or
parklike spaces such as seem to abound at Southampton, with now and then
a stretch of gleaming water, and here and there an open field with
people playing cricket in it. Swarms of holiday-makers strolled up and
down, and though it might be a Sunday, with no signs of a bad conscience
in their harmless recreations. There was much evidence of church-going
in the morning, but little or nothing in the afternoon. The aspect of
the crowd was that of comfortable wage-earners or shopkeepers for the
most part, such as the flourishing port maintains in ever-increasing
multitude, with none of the squalor which seems so inseparable from
prosperity in Liverpool. The crowd affirms the modern advance of
Southampton in its rivalry with the commercial metropolis of the north,
but we were well content in one of our walks to lose ourselves from it,
and come upon a neighborhood of fine old houses, standing in wide
grounds, now run wild with neglected groves, but speaking with the
voices of their secular rooks of the social glory which has long
departed. These mansions meant that once there was a local life of ease
and splendor which could hold its own against London, as perhaps the
life of no other place in England now does. If you took them at
twilight, their weed-grown walks simply swarmed with ghosts of quality,
in a setting transferred bodily from the pages of old novels.
[Illustration: “THE TRAM’S COURSE WAS LARGELY THROUGH UMBRAGEOUS
AVENUES”]
We had not the strength, social or moral, which their faded gentility
represented, to resist the pull of the capital, and in a few days,
shrivelled each to less than its twenty-four hours by the chill spring
air, we yielded, and started for London on the maddest, merriest
afternoon of all the glad Bank holidays of that Easter time. They have
apparently not so much leisure for good manners at Southampton as at
Bath, or even at Plymouth; the booking-clerk at the station met
inquiries about trains as snubbingly as any ticket-seller of our own
could have done, and so we chanced it with one of the many expresses, on
first-class tickets that at any other time would have insured us a whole
compartment. As it was they got us two seats more luxurious than money
could buy in an American train, and we were fain to be content. We were
the more content, because, presently, we were running through a forest
greater than I can remember as in these latter days bordering any
American railroad. Miles and miles of country were thickly wooded on
either side, with only such cart-tracks and signs of woodcraft as make
the page of Thomas Hardy so wild and primitive after twenty centuries of
Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman, in that often mastered but never
wholly tamed England. We came now and then to a wooden farm-house with
its wooden barns and outhouses, in an image of home which we would not
have had more like if we could: we had not come to England to be back in
America. Yet such is the perversity of human nature, that I who here am
always idealizing a stone house as the fittest habitation of man, and
longing to live in one, exulted in these frame cottages, and would have
preferred one for my English dwelling; even the wood-built stations we
whisked by had a charm because they were like the clapboarded depots,
freight and passenger, at our rustic junctions. Everywhere in England
one sees building of wood to an amazing extent, though the lumber for it
is not cut from English woods, but comes rather from Norway and
elsewhere in the densely timbered north. Of course it did not
characterize the landscape even in the region of the New Forest, which
but for its name we should think so old, but the gray stone of the
West-of-England farmsteads and cottages had more and more given way to
the warm red brick of the easterly south. This, as we drew near London,
paled to the Milwaukee yellow, here and there, and when this color
prevailed it was smirched and smutted with the smoke holding the
metropolis hidden from us till we could, little by little, bear its
immensity.
VII
IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
How long the pretty town, or summer city, of Folkestone on the
southeastern shore of Kent has been a favorite English watering-place, I
am not ready to say; but I think probably a great while. Very likely the
ancient Britons did not resort to it much; but there are the remains of
Roman fortifications on the downs behind the town, known as Cæsar’s
camp, and though Cæsar is now said not to have known of camping there,
other Roman soldiers there must have been, who could have come down from
the place to the sea for a dip as often as they got liberty. It is also
imaginable that an occasional Saxon or Dane, after a hard day’s
marauding along the coast, may have wished to wash up in the waters of
the Channel; but they could hardly have inaugurated the sort of season
which for five or six weeks of the later summer finds the Folkestone
beaches thronged with visitors, and the surf full of them. We ourselves
formed no part of the season, having come for the air in the later
spring, when the air is said to be tonic enough without the water. It is
my belief that at no time of the year can you come amiss to Folkestone;
but still it is better to own at the outset that you will not find it
very gay there if you come at the end of April.
We thought we were doing a very original if not a very distinguished
thing in putting our hand-baggage into a fly at the station, and then
driving with it from house to house for an hour and more in search of
lodgings. But the very first people whom we told said they had done the
same, and I dare say it is the common experience at Folkestone, where,
even out of season, the houses whose addresses you have seem to be
full-up, as the lodging-house phrase is, and where although every other
house in the place has the sign of “Apartments” in the transoms, or the
drawing-room windows, or both, you have the greatest difficulty in
fixing yourself. When one address after another failed us, the driver of
our fly began to take pity on us: too great pity for our faith, for we
began to suspect him of carrying us to apartments in which he was
interested; but we were never able to prove it, and by severely opposing
him, we flattered ourselves that we did not finally go where he wanted.
Perhaps we did, but if so it was the right place for us. If one landlord
had not what we wished, or had nothing, he cheerfully referred us to
another, and when we had seen the lodgings we decided were the best, we
did not and could not make up our minds to take them until we tried yet
one more, where we found the landlord full-up, but where he commended us
to the house we had just left as one of singular merit, in every way,
and with a repute for excellent cooking which we would find the facts
justify. We drove back all the more strenuously because of a fancied
reluctance in our driver, and found the landlord serenely expectant on
the pleasant lawn beside his house; he accepted our repentant excuses,
and in another minute we found ourselves in the spacious sitting-room
which had become ours, overlooking the brick-walled gardens of the
adjoining houses in the shelter,
[Illustration: THE BEACH, FOLKESTONE]
which slowly, very slowly, became the shade of a grove of tall, slim,
young trees. When a trio of tall, slim, young girls intent upon some
out-door sport in an interval of the rain, lounged through this grove,
we felt that we could not have made a mistake; when a black cat provided
itself for one of the garden walls, our reason was perfectly convinced.
Fortune had approved our resolution not to go, except in the greatest
extremity, to any sort of boarding-house, or any sort of hotel, private,
residential, temperant or inebriant, varying to the type of sea-side
caravansary which is common to the whole world, but to cling to an ideal
of lodgings such as we had cherished ever since our former sojourn in
England, and such as you can realize nowhere else in the world.
Our sitting-room windows did not look out upon the sea, as we had
planned, but with those brick walls and their tutelary cat, with these
tall, slim, young trees and girls before us, we forgot the sea. As the
front of our house was not upon the Leas (so the esplanaded cliffs at
Folkestone are called), you could not see the coast of France from it,
as you could from the house-fronts of the Leas in certain states of the
atmosphere. But that sight always means rain, and in Folkestone there is
rain enough without seeing the coast of France; and so it was not
altogether a disadvantage to be one corner back from the Leas on a
street enfilading them from the north. After the tea and bread and
butter, which instantly appeared as if the kettle had been boiling for
us all the time, we ran out to the Leas, and said we would never go away
from Folkestone. How, indeed, could we think of doing such a thing, with
that lawny level of interasphalted green stretching eastward into the
town that climbed picturesquely up to meet it, and westward to the
sunset, and dropping by a swift declivity softened in its abruptness by
flowery and leafy shrubs? If this were not enough inducement to an
eternal stay, there was the provisionally peaceful Channel wrinkled in a
friendly smile at the depth below us, and shaded from delicate green to
delicate purple away from the long, brown beach on which it amused
itself by gently breaking in a snowy surf. In the middle distance was
every manner of smaller or larger sail, and in the offing little stubbed
steamers smoking along, and here and there an ocean-liner making from an
American for a German port; or if it was not an ocean-liner, we will
call it so. Certainly there could be no question of the business and
pleasure shipping drawn up on the beach, on the best terms with the
ranks of bathing-machines patiently waiting the August bathers with the
same serene faith in them as the half-fledged trees showed, that
end-of-April evening, in the coming of the summer which seemed so
doubtful to the human spectator. For the prevailing blandness of the
atmosphere had keen little points and edges of cold in it; and vagarious
gusts caught and tossed the smoke from the chimney-pots of the pretty
town along the sea-level below the Leas, giving away here to the wooded
walks, and gaining there upon them. Inspired by the presence of a steel
pier half as long as that of Atlantic City, with the same sort of
pavilion for entertainments at the end, we tried to fancy that the
spring was farther advanced with us at home, but we could only make sure
that it would be summer sooner and fiercer. In the mean time, as it was
too late for the military band which plays every fine afternoon in a
stand on the Leas, the birds were singing in the gardens that border it,
very sweetly and richly, and not obliging you at any point to get up
and
[Illustration: THE PIER WITH ITS PAVILION]
take your hat off by striking into “God Save the King.” I am not sure
what kind of birds they were; but I called them to myself robins of our
sort, for upon the whole they sounded like them. Some golden-billed
blackbirds I made certain of, and very likely there were larks and
finches among them, and nightingales, for what I knew. They all shouted
for joy of the pleasant evening, and of the garden trees in which they
hid, and which were oftener pleasant, no doubt, than the evening. The
gardens where the trees stood spread between handsome mansard-roofed
houses of gray stucco, of the same type as those which front flush upon
the Leas, and which prevail in all the newer parts of Folkestone; their
style dates them of the sixties and seventies of the last century, since
when not many houses seem to have been built in Folkestone.
Probably these handsome houses were not meant for the lodgings that they
have now so largely if not mostly become. It is said that the polite
resident population has receded before the summer-folk who have come in
and more and more possessed the place, and to whom the tradesman class
has survived to minister. At any rate it is the fate of Folkestone to
grow morally and civically more and more like Atlantic City, which
somehow persists in offering itself in its wild, wooden ugliness for a
contrast as well as a parallel of the English watering-place. Nothing
could be more unlike the Leas than the Board Walk; nothing more unlike
their picturesque declivity than the flat sands on which the vast hotels
and toy cottages of the New Jersey summer-resort are built; nothing more
unlike the mild, many-steamered, many-schoonered expanse of the Channel,
than the immeasurable, empty horizon, and the long, huge wash of the
ocean. Yet, I say, there is a solidarity of gay intent and of like
devotion to brief alien pleasures in which I find the two places
inseparable in my mind.
If such a thing were possible, I should like to take the promenaders on
the Leas whom I saw in April, 1904, and interchange them with the same
number of those whom I saw two months before on the Board Walk fighting
their way against the northeasterly gale that washed the frozen foam far
in under it against the frozen sand. Yes, I should be satisfied if I
could only transpose the placid, respectable Bath-chairmen of the Leas,
and the joyous darkys who pushed the wheeled wicker-chairs of the Board
Walk, and turned first one cheek and then another to the blast, or took
it in their shining teeth, as they planted their wide, flat feet,
wrapped in carpet, with a rhythmical recklessness on the plank. I should
like, if this could be done, to ask the first, “Isn’t this something
like Folkestone?” and the last, “Isn’t this like Atlantic City?”
Perhaps it is only the sea that is alike in both, and the centipedal
steel piers that bestride it in either. The sea makes the exile at home
everywhere, for it washes his native shore and the alien coast with the
same tides, and only to-day the moss cast up on the shore at Dover
breathed the odor that blows in the face of the stroller on Lynn Beach,
or the Long Sands at York, Maine.
We were going by a corner of it to see the landing of the passengers
from the Calais boat, and to gloat upon what the misery of their passage
had left of them; but before we could reach the deck they had found
shelter in their special train for London. It used to be one of the
chief amusements of the visitors at Folkestone to witness such
dishevelled debarkations at their own
[Illustration: THE SHELTER UNDER THE LEAS]
piers, and we had promised ourselves the daily excitement of the
spectacle; but the arrival of the boats had been changed so as to
coincide with our lunch hour, and we pretended that it would have been
indelicate to indulge ourselves with it when really it was merely
inconvenient.
There are entertainments of an inoffensive vaudeville sort in the
pavilion on the pier, and yet milder attractions in the hall of the Leas
Pavilion, which for some abstruse reason is sunk some ten or twelve feet
below the surrounding level. The tea was yet milder than the other
attractions: than the fair vocalist; than the prestidigitator who made a
dozen different kinds of hats out of a square piece of cloth, and
personated their historical wearers in them; than the cinematograph;
than the lady orchestra which so often played pieces “By Desire” that
the programme was almost composed of them. A diversion in the direction
of ice-cream was not lavishly fortunate: the ice-cream was a sort of
sweetened and extract-flavored snow which was hardly colder than the air
outside.
At Folkestone we were early warned against the air of the sea-level,
which we would find extremely relaxing, whereas that of the Leas, fifty
feet above was extremely bracing. We were not able always to note the
difference, but at times we found the air even on the Leas extremely
relaxing when the wind was in a certain quarter. Once, in a long, warm
rain, I found myself so relaxed in the street back of the Leas, that but
for the seasonable support of a garden wall against which I rested, I do
not know how I should have found strength to get home. You constantly
hear, in England, of the relaxing and bracing effects of places that are
so little separated by distance, that you wonder at the variance of
their hygienic qualities. But once master the notion and you will be
able to detect differences so subtle and so constant that from bench to
bench on the Leas at Folkestone you will be sensible of being extremely
relaxed and extremely braced, though the benches are not twenty rods
apart. The great thing is to forget these differences, and to remember
only that the birds are singing, and the sun shining equally for all the
benches.
The sun is, of course, the soft English sun, which seems nowise akin to
our flaming American star, but is quite probably the centre of the same
solar system. The birds are in the wilding shrubs and trees which clothe
the front of the cliffs, and in the gardened spaces on the relaxing
levels, spreading below to the sands of the sea; and they are in the
gardens of the placid, handsome houses which stand detached behind their
hedges of thorn or laurel. This is their habit through the whole town,
which is superficially vast, and everywhere agreeably and often prettily
built. It is overbuilt, in fact, and well towards a thousand houses lie
empty, and most of those which are occupied are devoted to lodgings and
boarding-houses, while hotels, large and little, abound. There are no
manufactures, and except in the season and the preparatory season, there
is no work. Folkestone has become very fashionable, but it is no longer
the resort of the conservative or the aristocratic, or even the
æsthetic. These turn to other air and other conditions, where they may
step out-of-doors, or wander informally about the fields or over the
sands. A great number of smaller places, more lately opened, along the
everywhere beautiful English shore, supply simplicity at a far lower
rate than you can buy formality in Folkestone.
[Illustration: THE FISH-MARKET AT FOLKESTONE]
But the birds say nothing of all this, especially in the first days of
your arrival, when it is only a question whether you shall buy the most
beautiful house on the Leas, or whether you shall buy the whole town.
Afterwards, your heart is gone to Folkestone, and you do not mind
whether you have made a good investment or not. By this time though the
Earl of Radnor still owns the earth, you own the sky and sea, for which
you pay him no ground rent. Of your sky perhaps the less said the
better, but of your sea you could not brag too loudly. Sometimes the sun
looks askance at it from the curtains of cloud which he likes to keep
drawn, especially when it is out of season, and sometimes the rainy
Hyades vex its dimness, but at all times its tender and lovely coloring
seems its own, and not a hue lent it from the smiling or frowning
welkin. I am speaking of its amiable moods, it has a muddiness all its
own, also, when the Hyades have kept at it too long. But on a seasonably
pleasant day, such as rather prevails at Folkestone, in or out of
season, I do not know a much more agreeable thing than to sit on a bench
under the edge of the Leas, and tacitly direct the movements of the
fishermen whose sails light up the water wherever it is not darkened by
the smokes of those steamers I have spoken of. About noon they begin to
make inshore, towards the piers which form the harbor, and then if you
will leave your bench, and walk down the long, sloping road from the
Leas into the quaint, old seafaring quarter of the town, you can see the
fishermen auctioning off their several catches.
Their craft, as they round the end of the breakwater, and come dropping
into the wharves, are not as graceful as they looked at sea. In fact,
the American eye, trained to the trimmer lines of one shipping in every
kind, sees them lumpish and loggish, with bows that can scarcely know
themselves from sterns, and with stumpy masts and shapeless sails. But
the fishermen themselves are very fine: fair and dark men, but mostly
fair, of stalwart build, with sou’westers sloping over powerful
shoulders, and the red of their English complexions showing through
their professional tan. With the toe of his huge thigh-boot one of them
tenderly touches the edge of the wharf, as the boatload of fish swerves
up to it, and then steps ashore to hold it fast, while the others empty
a squirming and flapping heap on the stones. The heaps are gathered into
baskets, and carried to the simple sheds of the market, where the
beheading and disembowelling of fish is forever going on, and there
being dumped down on the stones again, they are cried off by one of the
crew that caught them. I say cried because I suppose that is the
technical phrase, but it is too violent. The voice of the auctioneer is
slow and low, and his manner diffident and embarrassed; he practises
none of the arts of his secondary trade; he does nothing, by joke or
brag, to work up the inaudible bidders to flights of speculative frenzy;
after a pause, which seems no silenter than the rest of the transaction,
he ceases to repeat the bids, and his fish, in the measure of a bushel
or so, have gone for a matter of three shillings. A few tourists, mostly
women, of course, form the uninterested audience. A few push-cart
dealers were there with their vehicles the day of my visit. Some boys
were trying to get into mischief and to compromise some innocent,
confiding dogs as their accomplices. One vast fish-woman, in a man’s
hat, with enormous hips and huge flanks, moved ponderously about, making
jokes at the affair, and shaking with bulky laughter.