from it towards the neighboring streets of humble old-fashioned houses,
and wondered in which of them it would have been that forty-three years
before a very home-sick, very young American, going out to be a consul
in Italy, stopped one particularly black midnight and had a rasher of
bacon. It seemed to me that I was personally interested in this
incident, as if I had been personally a party to it, and it was recalled
for my amusement, how a little old man, in a water-side fur cap of the
Dickens type, came to the front-door of that humble house, and, by the
dim light of the candle he bore, recognized the two companions of the
young American, who had made friends with them on the journey from
London, where they dwelt, and where they had left all their aspirates
except a few which they misplaced. I think they must have been
commercial travellers going to Paris upon some business occasion, and
used to the transit of the Channel, which was much more dependent then
than it is now, in its beginnings and endings, on the state of the tide,
so that it was no surprise either for them or for that old man to meet
at midnight on his threshold in a negotiation for supper. He set about
getting it with what always calls itself, in no very intimate relation
to the fact, cheerful alacrity, and at a rather smoky fire in the parlor
grate he set the tea-kettle singing, and burned the toast, and broiled
the bacon, which he then put sizzling before his guests, famished, but
gay and glad of heart. Even the heavy heart of the very homesick, very
young American was lifted by the simple cheer; and it seemed to him that
while there might have been and doubtless would be better bacon, there
actually was none half so good in the world. He had no distinct
recollection of the Channel crossing afterwards, and so it must have
been good, and he could recall little of the journey to Paris or the
sojourn there. Being as proud as he was poor, he travelled second-class
incognito, but some sense of an official quality must have transpired
from his mysterious reticence, for at Paris when they were taking
different trains from the same station, one of those good fellows came
to his car-window to shake hands. It was in that dark hour of the civil
war when the feeling between England and America was not the affection
of these halcyon days, but the good fellow put it in the form of a
kindly gibe. “I say,” he mocked, holding the American’s hand, “don’t
make it too ’ot to ’old us, down there?” Then he waved his hand and
disappeared, smiling out of that darkness of time and space which has
swallowed up so many smiling faces.
That darkness had swallowed up the humble Folkestone house, so that it
could not be specifically found, but there were plenty of other quaint,
antiquated houses, of which one had one’s choice, clinging to the edge
of the sea, and the foot of the steep which swells away towards Dover
into misty heights of very agreeable grandeur. In the narrow street that
climbs into the upper and newer town, there are curiosity shops of a
fatal fascination for such as love old silver, which is indeed so
abundant in the old curiosity shops of England everywhere as to leave
the impression that all the silver presently in use is fire-new. There
are other fascinating shops of a more practical sort in that street,
which has a cart-track so narrow that scarce the boldest Bath chair
could venture it. When it opens at top into the new wide streets you
find yourself in the midst of a shopping region of which Folkestone is
justly proud, and which is said to suggest to “the finer female sense,”
both London and Paris. Perhaps it only suggests a difference from both;
but at any rate it is very bright and pleasant, especially when it is
not raining; and there are not only French and English modistes but
Italian confectioners; one sees many Italian names, and their owners
seem rather fond of Folkestone, of which they may mistake the air for
that of the Riviera. I wish they would not guard so carefully from the
people at the Leas Pavilion the secret of the meridional ice-cream.
* * * * *
This street of shops (which abounds in circulating libraries) soon
ceases in a street of the self-respectful houses of the local type, and
from the midst of these rises the bulk of the Pleasure Gardens Theatre,
to which I addicted myself with my love of the drama without even the
small reciprocity which I experience from it at home. In the season, the
Pleasure Gardens adjacent are given up to many sorts of gayety, but
during our stay there was no merriment madder than the hilarity of a
croquet tournament; this, I will own, I had not the heart to go and pay
sixpence to see.
But at no season does Folkestone cease to be charming, if not in itself,
then out of itself. A line of omnibusses as well as a line of public
automobiles runs to the delightful old village of Hythe, which is mainly
a single street of low houses, with larger ones, old mansions and new
villas on the modest heights back of its sea-level, where the sea is
first of all skirted by a horse-car track. The cars of this pass the
ruins of certain old martello towers between the sea and the long canal
dug at the beginning of the last century as part of the defences against
the Napoleonic invasion, apparently in the hope that such of the French
as escaped the dangers of the Channel would fall into the canal and be
drowned. But the chief object of interest at Hythe, beside the human
interest, is the ancient church. It is of the usual mixture of Norman
and Gothic characteristic of old English churches, but it has the
peculiar merit of a collection of six hundred skulls, which with some
cords of the relative bones wellnigh fill the whole crypt. These sad
evidences of our common mortality are not æsthetically ordered, as in
the Church of the Capuchins at Rome, but are simply corded up and ranged
on shelves. The surliest of vergers ventures no fable such as you would
be very willing to pay for, and you are left to account for them as you
can, by battle, by plague, by the slow accumulation of the dead in
unremembered graves long robbed of their tenants. It is hard for you, in
the presence of their peculiar detachment, to relate these smiling
ground-plans of faces--
“Neither painted, glazed nor framed,”--
to anything at any time like the life you know in yourself, or to
suppose that there once passed in these hollow shells, even such poor
thoughts as do not quite fill your own skull to bursting.
It is, nevertheless, rather a terrible little place, that crypt, and you
come out gladly into the watery sunshine, and stray among the tombs,
where you are not daunted by the wide bill-board conspicuously erected
near the entrance with the charges of corporation, vicar and sexton for
burial in that holy ground, lettered large upon the panel. That is the
English outrightness, you say, that is the island honesty, and you try,
rather vainly, to match it with a like publication in such a place at
home which should do us equal credit. Other
[Illustration: THE ANCIENT CHURCH AT HYTHE]
things were very like country graveyards at home, though not those
strange, coffin shapes of stones which lie on so many graves in Kent,
and keep the funeral fact so strongly before the living. But there were
the grass-grown graves; the weather-beaten monuments, the wandering
brambles, the ineffectual flowers. Besides, there was the ever present
ivy, ever absent with us; and over the Gothic portal of the church was a
grotesque, laughing mask, with open mouth, out of which a sparrow flew
from her nest somewhere within the wrinkled cheeks. As if that were the
signal for it the chimes began to ring in the square, gray church tower,
and to fill the listening air with the sweetest, the tenderest tones.
The bells of St. Leonard’s at Hythe are famous for their tenderness,
their sweetness, and it was no uncommon pathos that flowed from their
well-tuned throats, and melted our hearts within us. Doubtless at the
same hour of every afternoon the forbidding verger returns to the crypt
which he has been showing to people all day at threepence a head, and
weeps for the hardness of his manner with emotional tourists. At any
rate the bells have made their soft appeal to him every afternoon for
the hundred and fifty-eight years since 1748, when a still older tower
of the church fell down, and they were put up with the new one.
The church-yard was half surrounded by humble houses of many dates, and
we came down by one of these streets to the main thoroughfare of Hythe
at the moment two little girls were wildly daring fate at the hands of
the local halfwit, who was tottering after them, with his rickety arms
and legs flung abroad as he ran, in his laughter at their mocking. It
was a scene proper to village life anywhere, but what made us localize
it in the American villages we knew was coming suddenly on the low
wooden cottage which stood flush upon the sidewalk, exactly in the way
of wooden houses of exactly the same pattern, familiar to our summer
sojourn in many New England towns. It might have stood, just as it was,
except for its mouldering and mossgrown tile-roof, on any back street of
Marblehead, or Newburyport, or Portsmouth, New Hampshire; yet it seemed
there in Hythe by equal authority with any of the new or old brick
cottages. There are in fact many wooden houses, both old and new, in
Hythe and Sandgate, and other sea-shore and inland towns of the
Folkestone region; the old ones follow the older American fashion in
their size and shape, and the newer ones the less old; for there are
summer cottages of wood in the style that has ultimately prevailed with
us. Many by the sea emulate the æsthetic forms of these, but in brick,
and only look like our summer cottages at a distance. The real wooden
houses when not very ancient, are like those we used to build when we
were emerging from the Swiss chalet and Gothic villa period, and the
jig-saw still lent its graceful touch in the decoration of gable and
veranda; and they are always painted white.
In all cases they either look American or make our houses of the like
pattern look English in the retrospect. On the line of the South Eastern
Railway in Kent are many wooden stations of exactly the sort I remember
on the Fitchburg Railroad in Massachusetts. They could have been
transposed without disturbing their consciousness; but what of the
porter at one of the Kentish stations whom I heard calling the trains
with the same nasal accent that I used to hear announcing my arrival at
n’Atholl, and n’Orange, Massachusetts? Was he a belated Yankee ancestor,
or was the brakeman of those prehistoric days simply his far
progenitor? Is there then nothing American, nothing English, and are we
really all one?
In the window of the little pastry shop at Hythe where we got some
excellent tea, there were certain objects on a lavish platter whose
identity we scarcely ventured to establish, but “What are these?” we
finally asked.
“_Doughnuts_,” the reply came, and we could not gasp out the question:
“But where are the baked beans, the fish-balls?”
We might well have expected them to rise like an exhalation from the
floor, and greet us with the solemn declaration, “We are no more
American than you are, with your English language, which you go round
with here disappointing people by not speaking it through your nose. We
and you are of the same immemorial Anglo-Saxon tradition; we are at home
on either shore of the sea; and we shall attest the unity of the race’s
civilization in all the ages to come.”
This would have been a good deal for the baked beans and the fish-balls
to say, but it would not have been too much. In that very village of
Hythe, where we lunched the Sunday after in a sea-side cottage of such
an endearingly American interior that we could not help risking praise
of it for that reason, there was a dish which I thought I knew as I
voraciously ate of it. I asked its honored name, and I was told, “Salt
haddock and potatoes,” but all the same I knew that it was inchoate
fish-balls, and I believe they had left the baked beans in the kitchen
as more than my daunted intelligence could assimilate at one meal. The
baked beans! What know I? The succotash, the chowder, the clam-fritters,
the hoe-cake, the flapjacks, the corned-beef hash, the stewed oyster,
with whatever else the ancient Briton ate--
“When wild in the woods the noble savage ran,”
and felt his digestion affected by a weird prescience of his
transatlantic posterity.
They do not serve hot tamales on the Leas of Folkestone yet, and perhaps
they never will, now that our national fickleness has relegated to a
hopeless back-numbership the hot-tamale-man, in his suit of shining
white with his oven of shining brass, and impoverished our streets of
their joint picturesqueness. It is possible that in the season they
serve other sorts of public food on the Leas, but I doubt it, for the
note of Folkestone is distinctly formality. I do not say the highest
fashion, for I have been told that this is “the tender grace of a day
that is dead” for Folkestone. The highest fashion in England, if not in
America, seeks the simplest expression in certain moments; it likes to
go to little sea-shore places where it can be informal, when it likes,
in dress and amusement, where it can get close to its neglected mother
nature, and lie in her lap and smoke its cigarette in her indulgent
face. So at least I have heard; I vouch for nothing. Sometimes I have
seen the Leas fairly well dotted with promenaders towards evening;
sometimes, in a brief interval of sunshine, the lawns pretty fairly
spotted with people listening in chairs to the military band. On bad
days--and my experience is that out of eighteen days at Folkestone
fourteen are too bad for the band to play in the Pavilion, there is a
modest string-band in the Shelter. This is a sort of cavern hollowed
under the edge of the Leas, where there are chairs within, and without
under the veranda eaves, at tuppence each, and where the visitors all
sit reading novels, and trying to shut the music from their
consciousness. I think it is because they dread so much coming to “God
Save the King,” when they will have to get up and stand uncovered. It is
not because they hate to uncover to the King, but because they know that
then they will have to go away, and there is nothing else for them to
do.
Once they could go twice a day to see the Channel boats come in, and the
passengers sodden from seasickness, limply lagging ashore. But now they
are deprived of this sight by the ill-behavior of the railroad in timing
the boats so that they arrive in the middle of lunch and after dark. It
is held to have been distinctly a blow to the prosperity of Folkestone,
where people now have more leisure than they know what to do with, even
when they spend all the time in the dressing and undressing which the
height of the season exacts of them. Of course, there is always the
bathing, when the water is warm enough. The bathing-machine is not so
attractive to the spectator as our bath-house, with the bather tripping
or limping down to the sea across the yellow sands; but it serves
equally to pass the time and occupy the mind, and for the American
onlooker it would have the charm of novelty, when the clumsy structure
was driven into the water.
I have said yellow sands in obedience to Shakespeare, but I note again
that the beach at Folkestone is reddish-brown. Its sands are coarse, and
do not pack smoothly like those of our beaches; at Dover, where they
were used in the mortar for building the castle, the warder had to blame
them as the cause of the damp coming through the walls and obliging the
authorities to paint the old armor to keep it from rusting. But I fancy
the sea-sand does not enter into the composition of the stucco on the
Folkestone houses, one of which we found so pleasantly habitable. Most
of the houses on and near the Leas are larger than the wont of American
houses, and the arrangement much more agreeable and sensible than that
of our average houses; the hallway opens from a handsome vestibule, and
the stairs ascend from the rear of the hall, and turn squarely, as they
mount half-way up. But let not the intending exile suppose that their
rents are low; with the rates and taxes, which the tenant always pays in
England, the rents are fully up to those in towns of corresponding size
with us. Provisions are even higher than in our subordinate cities,
especially to the westward, and I doubt if people live as cheaply in
Folkestone as, say, in Springfield, Massachusetts, or certainly Buffalo.
For the same money, though, they can live more handsomely, for domestic
service in England is cheap and abundant and well-ordered. Yet on the
other hand, they cannot live so comfortably, nor, so wholesomely. There
are no furnaces in these very personable houses; steam-heat is undreamed
of, and the grates which are in every room and are not of ignoble size,
scarce suffice to keep the mercury above the early sixties of the
thermometer’s degrees. If you would have warm hands and feet you must go
out-of-doors and walk them warm. It is not a bad plan, and if you can
happen on a little sunshine out-of-doors, it is far better than to sit
cowering over the grate, which has enough to do in keeping itself warm.
One could easily exaggerate the sense of sunshine at Folkestone, and yet
I do not feel that I have got quite enough of it into my picture. It was
not much obscured by fog during our stay; but there were clouds that
came and went--came more than they went. One night there was absolute
fog, which blew in from the sea in drifts showing almost like snow in
the electric lamps; and at momently intervals the siren horn at the
pier lowed like some unhappy cow, crazed for her wandering calf, and far
out from the blind deep, the Boulogne boat bellowed its plaintive
response. But there was, at other times, sunshine quite as absolute. Our
last Sunday at Folkestone was one of such sunshine, and all the morning
long the sky was blue, blue, as I had fancied it could be blue only in
America or in Italy. Besides this there remains the sense of much
absolute sunshine from our first Sunday morning, when we walked along
under the Leas, towards Sandgate, as far as to the Elizabethan castle on
the shore. We found it doubly shut because it was Sunday and because it
was not yet Whitmonday, until which feast of the church it would not be
opened. It is only after much trouble with the almanac that the
essentially dissenting American discovers the date of these church
feasts which are confidently given in public announcements in England,
as clearly fixing this or that day of the month; but we were sure we
should not be there after Whitmonday, and we made what we could of the
outside of the castle, and did not suffer our exclusion to embitter us.
Nothing could have embittered us that Sunday morning as we strolled
along that pleasant-way, with the sea on one side and the sea-side
cottages on the other, and occasionally pressing between us and the
beach. Their presence so close to the water spoke well for the mildness
of the winter, and for the winds of all seasons. On any New England
coast they would have frozen up and blown away; but here they stood safe
among their laurels, with their little vegetable gardens beside them;
and the birds, which sang among their budding trees, probably never left
off singing the year round except in some extraordinary stress of
weather, or when occupied in plucking up the sprouting peas by the
roots and eating the seed-peas. To prevent their ravage, and to restrict
them to their business of singing, the rows of young peas were netted
with a somewhat coarser mesh than that used in New Jersey to exclude the
mosquitoes, but whether it was effectual or not, I do not know.
I only know that the sun shone impartially on birds and peas, and upon
us as well, so that an overcoat became oppressive, and the climb back to
the Leas by the steep hill-side paths impossible. If it had not been for
the elders reading newspapers, and the lovers reading one another’s
thoughts on all the benches, it might have been managed; but as it was
we climbed down after climbing half-way up, and retraced our steps
towards Sandgate, where we took a fly for the drive back to Folkestone.
Our fly driver (it is not the slang it sounds) said there would be time
within the hour we bargained for to go round through the camp at
Shorncliff, and we providentially arrived on the parade-ground while the
band was still playing to a crowd of the masses who love military music
everywhere, and especially hang tranced upon it in England. If I had by
me some particularly vivid pots of paint instead of the cold black and
white of print, I might give some notion in color of the way the
red-coated soldiery flamed out of the intense green of the plain, and
how the strong purples and greens and yellows and blues of the
listeners’ dresses gave the effect of some gaudy garden all round them;
American women say that English women of all classes wear, and can wear,
colors in their soft atmosphere that would shriek aloud in our clear,
pitiless air. When the band ceased playing, and each soldier had paired
off and strolled away with the maid who had been simple-heartedly
waiting for him, it was as gigantic tulips and hollyhocks walking.
The camp at Shorncliff is for ten thousand soldiers, I believe of all
arms, who are housed in a town of brick and wooden cottages, with
streets and lanes of its own; and there many of the officers have their
quarters as well as the men. Once these officers’ families lived in
Folkestone, and something of its decay is laid to their removal, which
was caused by its increasing expensiveness. Probably none of them dwell
in the tents, which our drive brought us in sight of beyond the
barrack-town, pitched in the middle of a green, green field, and lying
like heaps of snow on the verdure. The old church of Cheriton, with a
cloud of immemorial associations, rose gray in the background of the
picture, and beyond the potential goriness of the tented field a
sheep-pasture stretched, full of the bloodless innocence of the young
lambs, which after imaginably bounding as to the tabor’s sound from the
martial bands, were stretched beside their dams in motionless exhaustion
from their play.
It was all very strange, that sunshiny Sunday morning, for the soldiers
who lounged near the gate of their camp looked not less kind than the
types of harmlessness beyond the hedge, and the emblems of their
inherited faith could hardly have been less conscious of the monstrous
grotesqueness of their trade of murder than these poor souls themselves.
It is all a weary and disheartening puzzle, which the world seems as far
as ever from guessing out. It may be that the best way is to give it up,
but one thinks of it helplessly in the beauty of this gentle, smiling
England, whose history has been written in blood from the earliest
records of the heathen time to the latest Christian yesterday, when her
battle-fields have merely been transferred beyond seas, but are still
English battle-fields.