such as parches the fields at home in exceptional summers. Rain had not
fallen during the heat from which we were escaping, and the grain had
been cut and stacked in unwonted safety from mould. There is vastly more
wheat grown in England than the simple American, who expects to find it
a large market-garden, imagines, and the yield was now so heavy that the
stacked sheaves served to cover half the space from which they had been
reaped. The meadow-lands were burned by the sun almost as yellow as the
stubble; the dry grass along the railroad banks had caught fire from the
sparks of the locomotive, and the flames had run through the hedges,
into the pasturage and stubble, and at one place they had kindled the
stacks of wheat, which farm-hands were pulling apart and beating out.
The air was full of the pleasant smell of their burning, and except that
the larks were spiring up into the dull-blue sky, and singing in the
torrid air, it was all very like home.
I ventured to say as much to the young man whom I found sleeping in the
full blaze of the sun in his corner of our carriage, and to whom I
apologized for the liberty I had taken in drawing his curtain so as to
shade his comely fresh face. He pardoned me so gratefully that I felt
warranted in thinking he might possibly care to know of the resemblance
I had noted. He said, “Ah!” in the most amiable manner imaginable,
“which part of America?” But just as I was going to tell him, the train
drew into the station at Oxford, and he escaped out of the carriage.
Before this he had remarked that we should find the drouth much worse as
we went on, for we were now in the Valley of the Thames, which kept the
land comparatively moist. But I could not see that the levels of harvest
beyond this favored region were different. Still the generous yield of
grain half covered the ground; the fires along the embankments continued
in places; in places the hay was just mown, and women were tossing it
into windrows; at a country station where we stopped there were fat,
heavy-fleeced sheep panting wofully in the cattle-pens; but the heat was
no worse than it had been. The landscape grew more varied as we
approached Worcester, where we meant to pass the night; low hills rose
from the plain, softly wooded; and I find from my note-book that the
weather was much mitigated by the amenity of all the inhabitants we
encountered. I really suppose that the underlined record, “_universal
politeness_,” related mainly to the railway company’s servants, but
there must have been some instances of kindness from others, perhaps
fellow-travellers, which I grieve now to have forgotten.
I have not forgotten the patience with which the people at the old
inn-like hotel in Worcester bore our impatience with the rooms which
they showed us, and which we found impossibly stuffy, and smelling of
the stables below. The inn was a survival of the coaching days, when the
stables formed an integral part of the public-house, but did not perfume
the fiction which has endeared its ideal to readers. The dining-room was
sultry, and abounded with the flies which love stables of the olden
times, or indeed of any date. We sat by our baggage in an outer room
till a carriage could be called, and then we drove back to the station,
through the long, hot, dusty street by which we had come, with a
poorish, stunted type of work-people crowding it on the way home to
supper.
Somewhere in the offing we were aware of cathedral roofs and towers, and
we were destined later to a pleasanter impression of Worcester than that
from which we now gladly fled by the first train for Great Malvern. Our
refuge was only an hour away, and it duly received us in a vast, modern
hotel, odorous only of a surrounding garden into which a soft rain was
already beginning to fall. A slow, safe elevator, manned by the very
oldest and heaviest official in full uniform whom I have ever seen in
the like charge, mounted with us to upper chambers, where we knew no
more till we awoke in the morning to find the face of nature washed
clean by that gentle rain, and her breath fresh and sweet, coming from
the grateful lips of the myriad flowers which embloom most English
towns.
I may as well note at once that it was not a bracing air which we
inhaled from them, and I do not suppose that the air is any more an
adjunct of the healing waters at Great Malvern than the air at Carlsbad,
for instance, where it is notoriously relaxing. The companionable
office-lady at our hotel, who was also a sort of lady-butler, and carved
the cold meats, candidly owned that the air at Great Malvern was
lifeless, and she boldly regretted the two years she had passed in New
England, as matron of a boys’ reformatory. She said, quite in the teeth
of an English couple paying their bill at the same time, that she was
only living to get back there. They took her impatriotism with a large
imperial allowance; and I shall always be sorry I did not ask them what
kind of bird it was they had with them in a cage; I think they would
have told me willingly, and even gladly, before they drove away.
We were ourselves driving away in search of lodgings, which, whether you
like them or not after you find them, it is always so interesting to
look up in England. It was our fate commonly to visit places in their
season when lodgings were scarce and dear; and it was one of the
surprises that Great Malvern had in store for us that it was in the very
height of its season. We should never have thought it, but for the
assurance of the lodging-house landladies, who united in saying so, and
in asking twice their fee as an earnest of good faith. The charming
streets, which were not only laterally but vertically irregular, and
curved and rose and fell in every direction, were so far from thronged
that we were often the only people in them besides the unoccupied
drivers of other flies than ours, and the boys who had pony chairs for
hire, and demanded height-of-the-season prices for them. Perhaps the
fellow-visitors whom we missed from the street were thronging in-doors:
the hotels were full up; the boarding-houses could offer only a choice
of inferior rooms; the lodgings had nearly all been taken at the rates
which astonished if they did not
[Illustration: MALVERN--THE TOWN]
dismay us. But we found the pleasantest apartment left at last, and were
immediately as much domesticated in it as if we had lived there ever
since it was built. In front it faced, across the street, a wooded and
gardened steep; in the rear, from the window of our stately
sitting-room, we looked out over a vast plain, of tilth and grass and
groves, cheered everywhere with farm villages or farm cottages, and the
grander edifices of the local nobility and gentry, and the spires of
churches. Farther off where the Cotswold Hills began to be blue,
glimmered Cheltenham, where we could, with a glass strong enough, have
seen the retired military and civil employés of the India service who
largely inhabit the place, basking in a summer heat of familiar tropical
fervor, and a cheapness suited to their pensions. In the same quarter
there was also sometimes visible a blur of dim towers and roofs which
the guide-book knew as Tewkesbury; in the opposite direction, Worcester
with its cathedral more boldly defined itself. The landscape seemed so
altogether, so surpassingly English, that one day when I had nothing
better to do--as was mostly the case with me in Malvern--I set down its
amiable features, which I wish I could assemble here in a portrait.
First, there were orchard and garden trees of our own house (one of a
dozen houses on the same curving terrace), with apples, pears, and plums
belted in by the larches and firs that deepened towards the foot of the
hill. Pretty, well-kept dwellings of more or less state, showed their
chimneys and slated or tiled roofs everywhere through the trees and
shrubs at the beginning of what looked the level from our elevation.
From these the plain stretched on, with hotels and churches salient from
rows of red brick and gray stone cottages. Fields, now greening under
the rains, but still keeping the warmer colors which the long drouth
had given them, were parted into every angular form by rigid hedge-rows.
They were fields of oats and grass, and sometimes wheat; but there were
no recognizable orchards; and the trees that dotted the fields, singly
and in clumps, massed themselves in forest effects in the increasing
distance. They covered quite a third of the plain, which stretched
twenty miles away on every hand, and were an accent of dark, harsh green
amid the yellower tone of the meadows. The Cotswolds rising to the
height of the Malvern Hills against the dull horizon (often rainy, now,
but dull always), ended the immense level, where, coming or going, the
little English railway trains, under their long white plumes of smoke,
glided in every direction; and somewhere through the scene the unseen
Severn ran.
Not to affront the reader’s intelligence, but to note my own ignorance,
until an unusually excellent local guide-book partially dispersed it,
will I remind him that all this region was once a royal chase. Half a
dozen forests, of which Malvern Forest was chief, spread “a boundless
contiguity of shade” over the hills and plains in which the cruel kings,
from Canute down to Charles I., hunted the deer consecrated to their
bows and spears, and took the lives or put out the eyes of any other man
that slew them without leave. But in virtue of the unwritten law by
which the people’s own reverts to them through the very pride of their
expropriators, the dwellers in and about Malvern Chase had insensibly
grown to have such rights and privileges in the wilderness that when
Charles proposed to sell the woods they made a tumultuous protest; they
rose in riot against the king’s will, and he had to give them two-thirds
of the Chase for commons, before he could turn the remaining third into
the money he needed so much.
[Illustration: THE PRIORY CHURCH--NORTH VIEW]
In the very earliest times Malvern seems to have been a British
stronghold against the Romans, and perhaps, again, the Saxons; but
otherwise its peaceful history is resumed in that of its beautiful
Priory church, an edifice which is fabled to have begun its religious
life as a Druid temple. On one of the three Beacons, as the chief of the
Malvern Hills are called, after the three counties of Worcester,
Gloucester, and Hereford in which they rise,
“Twelve fair counties saw the blaze”
which signaled the approach of the Spanish Armada. But the local history
is not of that dense succession of events, against whose serried points
the visitor so often dashes himself in vain elsewhere in England. He can
let his fancy roam up and down the vague past, with nothing, except the
possible surrender of Caractacus to the Romans, very definitely
important to hinder it, from the dawn of time to the year 1842, when the
Priessnitz system of water-cure chose Malvern the capital of English
hydropathy. The Wells of Malvern had always been famous for their
healing properties, and now modern faith added itself to ancient
superstition, and from the centre of belief thus established, a
hydropathic religion spread throughout England. Its monuments still
confront one everywhere in the minor hotels or major boarding-houses
which briefly call themselves Hydros, but probably do not attempt
working the old miracles. There is still a commodious shrine for the
performance of these in the heart of Malvern; but the place was plainly
no longer the Mecca of the pilgrims of thirty or fifty years ago. The
air of its hills indeed invites the ailing, who so abound in England,
but the waters have found the level which even medicinal waters seek,
and flow away in the obscurity attending the decline of so many once
thronged and honored Spas.
I do not know that I particularly like ruinous ruins, but a decay that
is still in tolerable repair is greatly to my mind. The better the
repair, the greater my pleasure in it, and when we were once posited in
our lodgings, I began to take comfort in the perfect neatness, the
unfailing taste, the pious care with which the spirit of that dead
Malvern guarded its sepulchre. There was all the apparatus of a social
gayety beneficial to invalids, but not, so far as I could note, an
invalid to profit by it, if it had been running. In a certain public
garden, indeed, in the centre of the town, there was a sound of revelry
emitted by a hidden band, in the afternoon and evening, but I had never
the heart to penetrate its secret; within, the garden might not have
looked so gay as it sounded. There were excellent large and little
shops, including a book and periodical store, where you could get almost
anything you wanted, or did not want, at watering-place prices. There
was an Assembly building, always locked fast, and a very good public
library where I resorted for books of reference, and for a word of
intellectual converse with the kind assistant librarian who formed my
social circle in Malvern. From somewhere in the dim valley at night
there came bursts of fragmentary minstrelsy, which we were told by the
maid was the professional rejoicing of Pierrots, a gleeful tribe summer
England has borrowed from the French tradition almost as lavishly as the
crude creations of our own burnt-cork opera. Wherever you go, among her
thronged and thronging watering-places, these strongly contrasted
figures meet and cheer you; even in Malvern there were strains of
rag-time, mingling with the music of the Pierrots, which gave assurance
of these duskier presences somewhere in the dark.
One afternoon we went to a politer entertainment in a lower room of the
Assembly building, given by a company which had so vividly plastered the
dead walls (if this is specific) of Malvern with the announcements of
their coming, that we hastened to be among the earliest at the
box-office lest we should not get seats. To make sure of seeing and
hearing we took two-shilling seats, which were at the front, and it was
well we did so, for before the curtain rose, a multitude of fourteen
people thronged to the one-shilling benches behind us. This number I
knew from deliberate count, for the curtain, as if in a sad prescience
of adversity, was long in rising. I do not think that company of artists
would have been very cheerful under the best conditions; as it was they
afforded us the very sorrowfulest amusement I have ever enjoyed. In that
pathetic retrospect it seems to me that one man and woman of them sang
at different times comic duets with tears in their voices. There were
also from time to time joyless glees, and there was an interlude of
dancing, so very, very blameless that it was all but actively virtuous
in its modesty. A sense of something perpetually provincial, something
irretrievably amateurish in the performers, penetrated the American
spectators; and it is from a heart still full of pity that I recall how
plain they were, poor girls, how floor-walkerish they were, poor
fellows. They were as one family in their mutual disability and
forbearance; if perhaps they each knew how badly the others were doing,
they did nothing to show it; and in their joint weakness they were
unable to spare us a single act of their programme. I have seldom left a
hall of mirth in so haggard a frame, but perhaps if I had been more
inured to Malvern I could have borne my pleasure better.
If this was not, strictly speaking, a concert, that was certainly a
concert which I attended one evening at a Baptist chapel, where a
company of Welsh miners sang like a company of Welsh angels. I was in
hopes they would have sung in Welsh, which, as is well known, was the
language of Paradise, but they sang in English as good as English ever
can be in comparison; and instead of Bardic measures, it was all
terribly classic, or when not classic, religious. As I say, though, the
voices were divine, and I asked myself if such heavenly sounds could
issue, at this remove, from the bowels of the Welsh mountains, what must
be the cherubinic choiring from their tops! It was a very simple-hearted
affair, that concert, and well encouraged by a large and cordial
audience, thanks mostly, perhaps, to the vigilance of the lady pickets
stationed down the lane leading to the chapel, and quite into the
street, with tickets for sale, who let no hesitating passers escape. I
myself pleaded a sovereign in defence, but one of the fair pickets
changed it with instant rapture, and I was left without excuse for the
indecision in which I had gone out to see whether I would really go to
the concert.
For the matter of that we were without excuse for staying on in Malvern,
save that it was so very, very pleasant though so very, very dull. It
was there, I think, that I formed the Spanish melon habit, which I
indulged thereafter throughout that summer, till the fogs of London
reformed me at end of September, when no more melons came from Spain.
The average of Spanish melons in England is so much better than that of
our cantaloupes at home that I advise all lovers of the generous fruit
to miss no chance of buying them. The fruiterer who sold me my first in
Malvern, said that in the palmy days of the place many Americans used to
come, and he mentioned a New York millionaire of his acquaintance so
confidently that I almost thought he was mine, and felt much more at
home than before. I had more talk with this kind fruiterer than with any
one else in Malvern, though I will not depreciate an interview with a
jobbing mechanic from far Norfolk, who spent an afternoon washing our
windows, and was conversible when once you started his torpid flow. He
did not grasp ultra-Norfolk ideas readily, and he altogether lacked the
brilliant fancy of the gay, rusty, frowsy ragged tramp who came one
afternoon with a bunch of cat-tail rushes for sale, and who had vividly
conceived of himself as a steel-polisher out of work. He might not have
been mistaken; but if he was it could not spoil my pleasure in him, or
in the weather which had now begun to be very beautiful, with blue skies
almost cloudless, and quite agreeably hot. It being the 12th of August,
a bank holiday fell on that day, and the town filled up with trippers
(mysteriously much objected to in England), who seemed mostly lovers,
and who arm in arm passed through our street. One indeed there was who
passed without companionship, playing the accordeon, his eyes fixed in a
rapture with his own music.
On several other days the town seemed the less reasoned resort of crowds
of harmless young people, who perhaps thought they were seeing the world
there, since it was the height of the Malvern season. They were at one
time more definitely attracted by the Flower Show at the neighboring
seat of a great nobleman, which was opened by his lady with due
ceremonies, and which enjoyed a greater popular favor. I myself followed
with the trippers there, partly because I had long read of that kind of
English thing without seeing it, and because in the spacious leisure of
Malvern it was difficult to invent occupations that would fill the time
between luncheon and dinner, even with an hour out for an afternoon nap.
It was just a pleasant drive to the nobleman’s place, and my progress
was attended by a sentiment of circus-day in the goers and comers on
foot and in fly, and the loungers strewn on the grass of the road-sides
and the open lots. At the gate of the nobleman’s grounds, we paid a
modest entrance, and there were still modester fees for several of the
exhibits. One of these was a tent where under a strong magnifying-glass
a community of ants were offering their peculiar domestic and social
economy to the study of the curious. But, if I rightly remember, the
pavilion which sheltered the flower-show was free to all who could walk
through its sultry air without stifling; it was really not so much a
show of flowers as of fruits and vegetables, which indeed bore the heat
better. Another free performance was the rivalry, apparently of
amateurs, in simple feats of carpentry and joiner-work as applied to
fence-building; but this was of a didactic effect from which it was a
relief to turn to the idle and useless adventures of the people who lost
themselves in a maze, or labyrinthine hedge and shared the innocent
hilarity of the spectators watching their bewilderment from a high
ground hard by. All the time there was a band playing, which when it
played a certain familiar rag-time measure was loudly applauded and
forced to play it again and again. It was a proud moment for the exile
from a country whose black step-children had contributed these novel
motives to the world’s music, in the intervals of being lynched.
The scene was all very familiar and very strange, with qualities of a
subdued county fair at home, but more ordered and directed than such
things are with us. As I say, I had long known its like in literature,
and I was now glad to find it so realistic. My pleasure in it overflowed
when the nobleman who had lent his premises for the show, came walking
out among the people, bareheaded, in a suit of summer gray, with his
lady beside him, and paused to speak, amid the general emotion, with a
neat old woman of humble class, whose hand his lady had shaken. That, I
said to myself, was quite as it should be in its allegiance to
immemorial tradition and its fidelity to fiction; it could have formed
the initial moment of a hundred thousand English novels. If it could not
have formed a like moment in American romance, it is because our
millionaires, in their shyness of subpœnas or of interviews, do not yet
open their private grounds for flower-shows. It needs many centuries to
mellow the conditions for the effect I had witnessed, and we must not be
impatient.
The lord and his lady had come out of a mansion that did not look very
mediæval, though it had a moat round it, with ducks in the moat, and in
the way to its portal a force of footmen to confirm any comer in his
misgiving that the house was closed to the public, and to direct him to
the pleasaunce beyond. This was a lawned and gardened place, enclosed
with a green wall of hedge, and guarded on one side with succession of
pedestals bearing classic busts. It was charming in the afternoon sun,
with groups of people seriously, if somewhat awe-strickenly, enjoying
themselves. The inferiors in England never take that ironical attitude
towards their superiors which must long delay a real classification of
society with us.
When there one accepts the situation, and becomes at least gentry if one
can, with all the assumptions and responsibilities which station
implies. I had a curious illustration of this in my own case when once I
came to pay the driver of my fly at the end of an excursion. It had
always been my theory that if only the people who exact tips would say
what tip they expected, it would greatly simplify and clarify the
affair. But now when this good-fellow said the fly would be twelve
shillings for the two hours, which I mutely thought too much, and then
added, “And two shillings for me,” I did not like it as well as my
theory should have supported me in doing. Had I possibly been meaning to
offer him one shilling? Heaven knows; but I found myself on the point of
lecturing him for his greed, when I reflected that it would be of no
use, at least in Malvern, for in Malvern when I went to a stable to
engage a fly for other excursions, they always said it would be so much,
and so much more for the driver. His tip, a good third of the whole
cost, seemed an unwritten part of the tariff, but it was an inflexible
law.
It is strong proof of the pleasantness of the drives that this novel
feature could not spoil them for us, and we were always going them.
There were pretty villages lurking all about in the shades of that
lovely plain, which if you passed through them on a Sunday afternoon,
for example, had their people out in their best, with comely girls seen
through the open doors of the above cottages, apparently waiting for
company, or, in its defect, sitting on benches in their flowery
door-yards and making believe to read.
The way was sometimes between tall ranks of trees, sometimes through
lines of hedge, opening at the hamlets and closing beyond them. Once it
ran by a vast