After that Taffy took us on these expeditions. How perfectly I recall a still, soft day, a quiet road intersecting deep woods--a road dark in summer with the leaf.a.ge of overarching trees--the phaeton with the white pony drawn up under the hedge, the mellow hunting cry of the pack sounding nearer and nearer, the speckle of red coats appearing and disappearing through the skeleton copse, the excitement, the rapture, the triumph--and a poor little drabbled fox struggling to evade his fate. He broke from the further hedge, crossed the road, and entered the hedge beside us almost under Taffy"s nose--one of the most sensational incidents of a hunting season that I can remember falling to the lot of us non-combatants. Dead beat he was, his heart bursting, his limbs scarce able to carry him; yet even tender-hearted women and children had no feeling for him in his lonely fight against the forces of the universe, no chivalrous impulse to befriend him in his extremity. A pair of hors.e.m.e.n crashed through the opposite hedge into the road--Lord S.
had lost his cap, and his hair was wild about his head--and they reined up to speak to us. To their excited "Where? Where?" we shouted "There!
There!" and pointed them after the fugitive. And if he fell into the jaws of the hounds at last I am sure we congratulated ourselves on having helped to put him there.
I pa.s.sed the very spot that afternoon, and it was just the same; only now it rained, and the trees were in full leaf, and there was no fox, nor hound, nor horse.
The dignified figure in the Hunt is, of course, the last-named animal.
He never sees the quarry, probably, or knows there is one, or cares. It is not the l.u.s.t of chasing and killing that inspires him to his gallant deeds--neither in fox-hunting nor in war. Watch a soldier"s horse in the evolutions of a review. A colonel of my acquaintance has told me that the moment the band of the regiment begins to play he feels his charger"s heart bound against his boot; so it is the music of the pack, telling of glorious effort and exercise, which fires the blood of the hunting horse that only hunts by proxy. The "scent of battle" is the scent of the old primitive life in free air and s.p.a.ce, the "Call of the Wild" to the still half-tamed.
Horses were a pa.s.sion in my family on both sides of the house. As a girl I have had my maternal grandfather named to me by strangers as "the doctor who drove the beautiful horses." His were not the requirements of the hunting man; he demanded the perfect form and action, the satin coat, the faultless turn-out. He was a very tall, high-nosed, stern-looking man, strikingly resembling the Iron Duke, and I used to see him come out to inspect the work of his groom before starting to ride or drive. He would not say a word, but would take his handkerchief to wipe some infinitesimal speck, visible to his eagle eye alone, and show the resultant stain to the guilty man; it covered him with confusion and dismay.
This martinet handled the reins himself, except at night, when other and less valuable animals were used--"Nightmare" was the name of one of them--until the state of his health obliged him to go abroad in a closed carriage. He hated this, and the necessity for giving his horses over to a hired coachman; and he was always putting his head out of window into the cold winds and fogs, that were so bad for him, forcibly to reprimand that much-to-be-pitied man. One raw winter day the grandfather"s short patience gave out; he mounted the box himself and drove the empty brougham home, regardless of consequences, which proved fatal to him. He caught pneumonia or something of that sort, and died in a few days.
As I may not be speaking of him again, I should like to say that, haughty old man as he was, taking the high hand with patients of all grades, he was most attentive to the poor, and never took a fee from them. The tradition is that he never sent an account for attendance to anyone--would not condescend to it (having traditions of his own behind him, along with a pedigree stretching back to the mists of prehistoric time)--but that"s as may be; he certainly left a very comfortable fortune, which, like that of the other grandfather, never reached the legatees. A son with whom he had been over-strict had run away from home many years before, and never afterwards been heard of. It was deemed impossible to fulfil the direction of the will to divide the property between the testator"s children until the missing one was produced, or irrefragable proof of his death. Through all the period between my childhood and womanhood the newspapers of the world were calling through their agony columns for one or the other, and in vain. It was reported at intervals that his grave had been found, in New Zealand or Kamstchatka, or some equally remote corner of the earth; or that someone had met somebody who knew him or where he was; at which times the lawyers were put upon the trail to hunt the matter down. Each of the producible children had her separate batch of lawyers, and Chancery took charge of the steadily dwindling estate. Many years elapsed before the missing one was officially a.s.sumed to be dead, and the dregs of their patrimony allotted to his sisters; and then the portion that would have been ours was gone. How well I understand now little incidents that were devoid of meaning to me when they occurred: mother, in tears, confiding to a bosom friend: ""Do you sign this of your own free will?" he asked me before us both, and what could I say?" Poor mother; who struggled for us so hard! And the Married Woman"s Property Act is of very little use to wives like her, who still cling to the old ideals of family life.
So we were always tantalised with "expectations" that never materialised in cash. We children, as we developed the faculty for romancing, beguiled ourselves with a special one of our own. Some day, in some dramatic manner, the vanished uncle--lost long, long before we were born--was to reappear, with his pockets full of gold, to play G.o.dfather to his impoverished relatives. We were always looking out for him. A strange step on the gravel, an unexpected knock at the door would instantly suggest to us that the psychological moment had arrived. But no one could ever have been lost more thoroughly than that poor boy, who ran away at night because his father had been too hard on him. From that day to this;--covering something like three-quarters of a century--he has made no sign.
If my grandfather"s love of horses caused his death, the working of the same pa.s.sion in my father"s weaker nature was rather more unfortunate.
He sacrificed to it and its kindred fascinations the important interests of his life, including those he held in trust for his wife and children.
I do not say it to blame him, who was so kind-hearted and well-meaning; he was as he was made--happy-go-lucky, careless, thoughtless, sanguine, a boy to the last--and it was bad for such an one to have the illusion of "money coming to him" to encourage and excuse folly. In the fifties he was not a poor man, but he was too poor for the company he kept, too poor to afford to neglect business and indulge in the expensive pastimes of those who had none. But if he could be at M---- with the beloved "Harry" V., who was so generous with mounts, he would not be at home with uninteresting ploughmen. Norfolk folk who are my contemporaries will not need to have that "Harry" more fully named to them, especially when I add that I heard him spoken of as "The Old Squire" all over the western part of the country, although he had been dead so long. M---- House, his once hospitable home, was quite close to my cousin"s Abbey, and, although my father had been there so much, it was the first time I had seen it. I walked around the walls and grounds that were so familiar to him, but did not attempt to enter, the family being in residence.
Since my return to Australia I have learned from a mutual friend that they remember his name and the old companionship; so I might have been, and regret that I was not, less modest. The old squire and the golden age of fox-hunting in Norfolk, it seems, pa.s.sed together, and the one is said to be as likely to return as the other.
But a rather probable reason for this seems to lie in the fact that Norfolk has become such an extensive game preserve. Pa.s.sing the old estates, whose old owners wore the pink as a winter livery, I noted the little colonies of coops by the gamekeepers" cottages. At Sandringham I saw pheasants sauntering about the royal domain like domestic poultry, and caught the gleam of their bronzy plumage again and again in the twilight of the thick woods. Evidently they are brought up in the lap of luxury as well as in swarms, and are too precious to be scared and scattered by trampling hosts of horses and hounds.
Times have changed for the one sport as for the other. And, thinking of the difference, I am drawn to the conclusion (though it is not for me to have opinions, I know) that the shooting season cannot be to the common run of sportsmen what it used to be to their fathers. They may shoot better, and at more birds--they do, and so they ought--and for rich men, as one can understand, the old system is not comparable to the new; but the sport was more genuinely sport--was it not, my fellow-fogies of sporting blood?--and it must have had more charm for the many, if not for the few, than is the case now. When the stubble was left for partridges, and not ploughed up as soon as cut, and the fields and plantations lay quiet, through all that golden month which I believe is virtually useless to the scientific gunner to-day--when the autumn was still young and lovely and the red leaves on the trees--that must have been a pleasanter surrounding for the sportsman who was a lover of nature than murky skies and naked woods. To have the companionship of dogs, such as dogs used to be, cleverer than the masters with whom they were in such perfect sympathy and partnership--as a dog lover I cannot understand how men can have bettered sport by leaving them out of it. To wander at will over field and along hedgerow, with the muzzle-loader of the period over shoulder, the sufficient game-bag on hip, powder and shot in pocket, and the trusty scout ahead, undisturbed by steam-ploughs or the fear of fluttering preserves, no restriction whatever upon one"s liberty and inclinations; this must have been as good a form of recreation as the drilled sharpshooting of to-day, although it may not have been as good business.
At any rate, my father loved it--at such times as he could not be following the hounds.
And so the winter came on, and the whist parties of an evening; and presently the exciting preparations for Christmas. Then Christmas itself--the holly, the mistletoe, the resplendent tree, the feasts and dances and miscellaneous merrymakings. The old year pa.s.sed with these cheerful obsequies; the birth of the new year was celebrated in loving family conclave and with chimes from the village belfry (we could not have midnight services in a church with no lighting apparatus); another year of the same uneventfulness, which yet was to be as full of interest as ever.
CHAPTER XI
AT THE SEASIDE
I have been looking over a batch of new magazines, and the heading of a paper in one of them gives a sentence borrowed from a letter of Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Dean Howells, which I will borrow again for an opening to this chapter: "I"ve a theory that every author while living has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant places and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never knew him in the flesh. When the author dies this phantom fades away ... then the dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature." Having written this down and looked at it, I feel that it is not so profound a saying as I thought. The first proposition is as obvious as can be; your eidolon is in the pages of your book, and the more directly you speak to your affinity the more quickly he responds (and he cannot respond effectively unless you are there to know it); the second seems to pa.s.s over the fact that when these spirit friendships materialise they become as other friendships, independent of literature or any outside thing. What I set out to show, by my quotation, was that the friends my eidolon had made for me in England outnumbered the friends of corporeal origin, and that some of them gave me my happiest English days. I flew to their arms as naturally and fearlessly as if I had lived with them in the flesh for as many years as we had otherwise known each other, and when I am dead I shall not be a dead author to them, but a dead woman. Alas! the phantom fades away in any event.
This I have found to be the prime joy of authorship--the knowledge that, when you are projecting yourself into your book, although n.o.body around you may know or care what you are talking about, you are still bound to reach some who will perfectly understand. You are speaking to your unknown kindred in the near and distant places; if you do not know it at the time--but you do know it--the proof comes later in the letters of some of them, who tell you they have been impelled to write. Precious recognition! And letters are so eloquent between the lines that you rarely make mistakes about them. They tell you that the wireless message has got "home" to where it belongs--or otherwise.
At the beginning of this century I published a volume of personal reminiscences, ent.i.tled "Thirty Years in Australia." Coincident with the conversion of the colony of Victoria into a state of the new Commonwealth, the thirtieth year of my sojourn within her borders was completed in 1900, and it seemed a good time to say something of what in our young country we call the "old days," the "good old times," the old pioneer colonial life of which the records are so few at home and the ignorance abroad so vast. Although, when I come to think of it, I believe it was merely as a rest from novel-writing that I started upon the work. I gossiped through the casual chapters--drivelled, some may say, much as I am doing now--with no idea that the completed book would be other than a trifling by-product (my London agent agreeing with this view), of little interest to readers outside Australia. But behold! Of the score or more of "works" to which I must plead guilty, this one has brought me more happiness than all the others put together, on each of which the profit in love has been more considerable than the profit in money. Old friends of the seventies, long pa.s.sed from sight and knowledge although not from mind, recognised themselves in the guarded initials of their names, and they or their widowed partners or their children wrote to tell me where they were, to recall past companionships, to urgently beg and hospitably plan for a renewal of them. And thus came delightful reunions, mendings of gaps, comparing of experiences, comradeships for old age such as can never be for those who have not spent some of their youth together.
But far beyond the number of these were the friends not made by accident but by the design of Nature, although the accident of the book discovered them--friends altogether unknown until it found them for me in the near and distant places--also to be lost no more.
Away in Ireland lived a retired colonel of Hussars, who one day took it from the shelves of his local library. He did not fancy the t.i.tle--Australia was not a name to conjure with in the British Isles, British though she was--but, after turning a few leaves, he thought it might serve for an idle hour. He read it aloud to his wife after dinner, and when he had finished it he wrote to me. It was the beginning of a correspondence which, by the time I started for England, gave me the hope of seeing them as one of the joys before me. And when I arrived their welcoming letter was amongst the first batch to come on board, and notified that he was himself in London, "at my service." As was the case in every situation of this kind, sanguine antic.i.p.ations were fulfilled, and something left over. Never once was I disappointed in a spirit friend made flesh. I met him first at luncheon in the house of the beloved friend who had set herself to give me the time of my life, and he helped her to do it. I shall not forget the Ascot week of 1908.
Certainly I have not much time to remember it in, but if I had a hundred years it would be the same. After we had "done" London--the restaurant dinners and the plays, the pictures, the flip-flap and the Sports" Club at the Franco-British Exhibition, little gaieties of a world I had not known but took to like a duck to water--he planned out my route to Ireland. That would have been the crown of all, but time and money would not stretch to it. Never mind. I still expect to go there some day.
Then away in Boston--Boston in Ma.s.sachusetts--there lives another dear friend, discovered just as he was. For years we have corresponded intimately, and every line that I write for the press I can regard as a letter to her. She would come to Australia to see me, if she could; the possibility of such an enterprise on the part of a much-engaged wife and mother has been considered; but her promise to meet me in England, should I ever be there, was absolute. One does not allow for the "visitation of G.o.d" in making one"s engagements, and it was only that which abrogated this one. I heard from her that she had been ready to start, not for London but for my ship at the docks, to be the first to receive me, bringing over a motor for my English use; and illness in her family had stopped her. She begged me to wait for the following spring, but I could not; and so we have not materialised each other yet. If we never do so, we shall love each other to the end. But we are hoping still.
And there were other friends of the eidolon in England and inaccessible, whose letters of welcome awaited me at Gravesend. One of them lived, as she still lives, at that watering-place on the Norfolk coast where I spent happy summers with my family when a child. That is to say, she lives in the new watering-place (not in existence then) which is an offshoot of the one I knew, still an old village, which its modern neighbour was from the first forbidden to touch. The lord of the manor comprising both--he who kept drinking houses and dissenting chapels off his land for so long--had a sense of the fitness of things so fine that it was almost a fad. When he allowed the new watering-place on the cliff where but one solitary house--an inn--had stood in my time, he laid the plan of the town himself and permitted only a beautiful brown stone of the locality to be used for the houses. Now vulgar bricks and jerry-building are creeping in, because his son, the present squire, cannot help it; but the good taste of the founder can stand up against them for a long time to come. It was never the typical fashionable watering-place, and, thanks to him, never can be until his work is swept away.
It is a great place, however, to have grown up in the interval since I walked to it from old H----, with my governess, to inquire at the "New Inn" (old then, and a beautiful house now) whether by chance they had such a things as "Revalenta Arabica," which a doctor or somebody had recommended for our dying baby, and for which we had ransacked the village in vain. I think that was my last sight of "The Green" that now is, which the local guide-book describes as "a standing reminder of the artistic mind that conceived and executed the formation of H----." To the people of this part, _they_ are H---- now, and the ancient village a mile away is Old H----; more often it is insultingly referred to as the Old End; to me the village is H----, and this New H----. Of course this H---- monopolises all the luxuries of civilisation; not only the old "New Inn" (with a new name and enlarged and important), on one side of the Green, but a huge G.E.R. Hotel, with the railway station under it, on the other; a great Town Hall, a grand pier with pavilion at the end of it, a fine stone-bal.u.s.traded "Sea Walk" above the beach, public gardens, public tennis-courts; a splendid church, with its independent vicar and curate, and (which should surely make the late squire turn in his grave) a Wesleyan Chapel and a "Union" Chapel, the latter evidently some other irregular denomination, since I do not think New H---- has a workhouse yet; besides gas and telephones and all such things.
And so here lived my friend, where she could be quite comfortable. But in the days when she was not a widow, but wife of a rector of the neighbourhood--and before that, as a member of an old Norfolk family (she married into another)--she knew all about the H---- of my day; and when she chanced to read "Thirty Years in Australia," and penetrated my dark allusions to the locality and my unprinted thoughts about it, the kindly notion came into her head to tell me that my old H---- of cherished memory was still there, unchanged. With the divination of a spirit friend she knew just what it would mean to me to know that. Not only did she write to tell me, she sent me a bundle of photographs to prove her words. When I received them, I had no ghost of an idea that I should ever see H---- again with my bodily eyes, and they gushed tears over the little postcard scenes, so full of sad and sweet reminders of vanished hands and days that were no more. I kept them on a table by my Australian bedside, and used to strike matches in the middle of the night and light a candle to look at them once more, and again once more.
Little did I foresee the day when I should buy them at their place of origin (fourpence a dozen) for myself!
Of course I wrote to thank her, although I could not find words to thank her adequately; it was the beginning of a correspondence signifying a lasting friendship.
And, amongst the many unexpected things that have happened to me of late was my visit to H---- and to her, just a year ago from this date of writing about it.
For once letters had not revealed the writer; she was not at all the type of woman they had suggested to my mind; nevertheless we suited each other, to use an expressive vulgarism, "down to the ground." In spite of a const.i.tutional objection to strangers and dislike of "company" as such, common to us both, and in spite of marked differences of view upon important points between us, a very short time sufficed to bring us to that state of mutual trust and understanding in which we could say anything we liked to one another. And that is a state that many lifelong friends, the vast majority of them indeed, not to speak of near and dear relations, do not attain to.
But I must not talk here of our private affairs. Nor can I dwell as I would like to dwell upon the domestic aspect of the fortnight we spent together. I can say this much, however, she has the instinct for home-making that is so surprisingly lacking (according to my experience) in nine housewives out of ten. The stupidity of my s.e.x in this important business is one of the perennial annoyances of my life. It is not a question--or in but a very small degree a question--of money. Mrs B.
would know how to make a bark hut comfortable, or a fork of the ancestral tree. So would I. I could not have loved her as I do if her house had been disordered and her habits out of drawing; I am sure she must have cared less for me if I had not appreciated the refined simplicity combined with luxurious comfort of her menage. I do like comfort, and see no reason to apologise for it as for a gross taste and a low. When I go into splendid rooms that are not used, or that have no fire in them on a chilly day, I feel as cross as when I see someone sitting by the open door of a railway carriage when the train moves, without putting out a hand to shut it. When I pa.s.sed through Mrs B."s kitchen (at such times as it was convenient to us to return home by way of the back gate), and looked upon M."s shining range and twinkling dish-covers, the clear, dustless fire, the bright rug on the spotless floor, the cheerful red tablecloth, and her little tea, as dainty as ours, set out--that to me was a beautiful room, surpa.s.sing the saloons of palaces.
Our days were ordered perfectly, for real, downright comfort, when that was all that needed to be considered, as was then the case with Mrs B.
and me. She knew intuitively that I would like my tea at half-past six better than at seven or later--as she did herself--and brought it to me then in her own hands, which had prepared the delicious tray. This was to strike the keynote of the harmonious hours. Having refreshed myself I had an hour or two of reverie in my soft bed, my brain cleared to brightness by the tea, the freshness of the summer morning about me. It was the only house except my own in which I had ever found it possible to do a bit of professional work, and it was in that peaceful interval between tea and bath that ideas for it were born and shaped themselves.
At eleven the pony-carriage came round. She is a fine whip, but never used the implement on her own pony, a half Arab, wholly aristocratic animal, not quite in his first youth; he and she were on the footing of mother and son, with a complete understanding between them. Just to keep him in his place she would pretend to draw the whip from its socket occasionally, and although he had no eyes in the back of his head it was enough to recall him to zealous duty. He nuzzled in her coat pockets for sugar, and he knew her voice when he could not see her, whinnying wildly from his stall at the livery stables, where she sometimes visited him.
Almost daily he arrived to take us out, always in a fresh direction, always over country that I had known and loved and never hoped to see again, until I began to forget I had ever left it.
At one o"clock we returned--I ravenously hungry--to the ever-perfect meal. Thereafter more or less subdued and somnolent we repaired to the drawing-room and two seductive resting-places therein; one was a remarkably comfortable long sofa, the other a remarkably comfortable deep easy-chair, and each of us took one, and it did not matter which.
The day"s newspapers lay at hand, and our respective work-bags, but we frankly allowed ourselves to drop asleep, which was perhaps the most profitable occupation for a pair of grandmothers at that period of the day, although one I was not accustomed to indulge in. At half-past four came M., with the tea-table, her transparent bread-and-b.u.t.ter, her memorable cakes and hot cakes, her jug of freshest cream, the boiling kettle and the caddy. And after such a tea as that, it was well that the next item of the programme was a walk, to prepare us for the equally appealing little dinner to be engaged in at eight.
It was in these walks that I drew nearest to the ghosts of the old days that thronged the place. Some obscure spinal delicacy prevented my hostess from going far on her own feet, although she was so majestically erect and so strong and young to look at; so she would carry book or knitting to a seat upon the Green (a gra.s.sy plateau at the top of the cliff, sloping seaward), or to one of the gla.s.s-walled shelters, useful Queen"s Jubilee Memorials, planted at intervals alongside the cliff path, between the Green and the Lighthouse, and there rest and amuse herself while I wandered as I liked. We were so entirely at ease with each other that no apologies for such casual separations were required.
Naturally I walked away towards the Old End every time. And as soon as the last Jubilee Shelter was behind me I was in the world of my youth, where almost nothing was changed. How many hundreds of times had my feet scampered along that dear cliff path--to come back, after such far wanderings, to find it just the same! Only a track in the sea gra.s.s, a little more hollowed out perhaps, a little nearer to the cliff face, which the waves below had nibbled away until there was barely room to get past the lighthouse wall. The same wild scabiouses that we found there in bygone Augusts were blooming, richly purple as the clematis on Mrs B."s house front, along the cliff edge. Half-a-century was gone like a pa.s.sing puff of wind as I stooped to gather them. A dozen times I had to stop and wheel to look across the sea so different from every other sea; and in the evening fight, especially in clear shining after rain, the old "Stump" stood up like a pencil-mark on the far-distant horizon, and I saw again the ravelled threads that meant Skegness on the one hand and "The Deeps" on the other, familiar as the nose on my own face. This cliff path used to be the beat of our old friends, the coastguardsmen, who paced it solemnly day and night, with their telescopes under their arms. I saw no coastguard now, or I must have accosted him, and asked him to let me peep through his gla.s.s, for old sake"s sake. He used to go on one knee and steady the instrument on his shoulder, and we used to stand behind him to gaze and exclaim.
Down below lay the great green-haired boulders, the tumbled rocks of the hard conglomerate that outlasted the superimposed strata of the rainbow-cake-like cliff, where doubtless the contraband cask or case found--or but for him would have found--temporary storage in the good old times; but I did not go down, because now the trippers pervaded the beach (leaving to the residents their more aristocratic terraces and Green), and the squalid litter of their picnics defiled the place.
Half-a-century ago it was our happy hunting ground, and almost all our own. Here we plied bucket and spade from morn to eve; gathered marvellous treasures from the clear wells and pools between the rocks, ammonites out of the grey marl, "thunderbolts" out of the red chalk; chased crabs and shrimps and little fishes, built forts and castles, sailed boats and nursed dolls, and so on and so on; busy and happy the livelong day. At this point we were caught by the tide one day, and had to sit on a rock ledge till it uncovered the way home. In that archipelago of boulder-islands my foot once slipped into a crevice and was crushed, and the landlady of our lodgings rubbed salt into the bleeding wounds because, she said, that was the way to prevent mortification. Every flat stone, all up and down the beach, was eloquent of mid-morning and mid-afternoon meals, when mother or nurse came down to us with loaded basket to stay our little stomachs between breakfast and dinner and dinner and high tea. Oh, how magnificently hungry we were in those days! And what digestions we had!
The first old landmark that I came to after leaving New H---- behind me was the ruin of St Edmund"s Chapel. A little fragment of a building that looks, almost as primitive as the cliff supporting it, I should think it could be carted away in a day by a couple of labourers who set their minds to the job; yet there it stood, not a stone displaced, that I could see, since I had played about it as a child. King Edmund the Martyr, say the old chroniclers, built the hermitage of which this is all remaining to commemorate the spot where he landed and to make himself a private study in which to learn the whole Book of Psalms by heart. Think of the hundreds of years of its history, back of the fifty of mine! I used not to think of it, but I thought of it a great deal when I stood on the hallowed ground again.
Then came the lighthouse--still the old lighthouse to the best of my recollection, but with a Marconi installation and a few cottages and their families added to it. And once it seemed to stand away in a field, and now it is so near to the cliff edge that there is scarcely room to get past the wall. The wall may be breached at any moment, and it will not be long after that before they will have to rebuild the tower.
I leaned over that low wall and looked into the enclosure. The men were having a game of cricket--such a natural thing to see where one sees a group of official Englishmen doing as they like in their off time (they were playing cricket at Aden and at Suez, regardless of the sweltering heat). When these lighthouse men, coming and going in their game, glanced towards me, watching them, it struck me as such a strange thing that they did not know who I was. I felt almost as if I had more right to be there than they. But when I totted up the years of my absence and the years of the oldest man amongst them, I knew I could be nothing to him but a stranger and an outsider, even as any other summer visitor out for a walk along the cliff. Yet how I longed to beckon him to the wall and ask him if he remembered the old times!
Beyond the lighthouse the cliff fell away gradually to a gradually diminishing sand-bank--as, of course, it had always done; and, descending the sloping path, I saw below me my old village, my own old beach, untouched by the hand of "improvement" which had been so busy near by. No, not quite untouched; the old village inn and coaching-house (when we first frequented the place there was no railway, and we coached the fifteen miles from L----) was now "The Golf Links Hotel," enlarged and modernised, and it had absorbed into its new grounds an old lane between hedges, along which we used to go and come, and which I had desired to perambulate again; but neither the hotel nor the links obtruded into the picture, which was substantially the same as I had known and remembered it. The bathing-machines had been moved from their former prominent position, and they had been a great feature. Every morning a couple of them rolled us into the water, where the bathing-woman was sometimes cruelly employed to dip us under, and haul us out again; and a picture of a little brother squatted naked on the roof of one of them, whither he had leaped from the wheel to evade her, and whence he refused to budge for any threats or blandishments, was plain before me when I looked for the machines where they used to be.
But this was the real thing--this was the old place, sacred to the old times. Once more I waded through heavy sand, that sifted into my boots, as we did before New H----, with its greens and esplanades and Jubilee Shelters, was dreamed of; I had to look about before I could find a clump of sea-gra.s.s on which to rest after my walk, while I surveyed and meditated upon the scene.
As was the case with other haunts of childhood and youth revisited, the actual place was not half the size nor of half the importance that I had supposed. To think that this little patch of beach and sandbank, with one occasional sail-boat (old Sam"s _Rose in June_), a few donkeys and four or five bathing-machines for all its furnishing, should have been such a dream of romance, such a memory of joy, for more than half-a-century! But there was no doubt about it, and less than ever now.
All the year round, in those old years, from late summer to early summer, I used to be counting days to "the seaside" again; and the rapture of each first evening when, the coach having dropped us at our lodgings, and our tea having been unpacked and eaten, we trooped to the beach (buying our spades and buckets at the post office on the way), to make sure that the sea was there before we went to bed--I could not outlive it in a thousand years. If ever I was happy in this mortal life, I was happy here, although I did break my heart over the corpse of a baby brother and have salt rubbed into a cut foot--also a governess in attendance and lesson-books, at times. But not _the_ governess, fortunately; otherwise old H---- would not have called me back like this.
The tide was in, peacefully lapping the smooth sh.o.r.e. When it went out it went a long way, uncovering many acres of fine ribbed sand, strewn over with sea jewels; and great dark patches, that were mussel beds, the treasure ground of all. What multi-coloured sea-anemones we found there!
And how hard it was to remember that the returning tide, with its unseen flank movements, would a.s.suredly drown us if in our absorption we lost count of time! And away there, also hidden under the silver sheet, lay the mysterious buried forest--post-glacial trees with their black trunks and limbs intact, in one of which a stone axe was found sticking, just as the Stone Age man had left it. There were, I had been told, ebon gateposts, dug from this submerged woodland, on farm lands of the neighbourhood, and fragments came into our possession, fashioned into brooches and bracelets, as presents from local friends. I used not to consider the significance of these things. Now I read the buried forest into the pedigree of my native country, the splendour of which is lost upon those who stay at home.
When I was rested and had gazed my fill, I rose and turned to the right, up the low bank, towards the village--to find our old camping-places, if they existed still. I ought to have gone through a wicket at the top of the bank, through the narrow, high-hedged lane, past the windows of the old coaching inn, through which Honor W. used to lean and chat with the casual wayfarer and her father"s guests. Where is that pleasant-voiced, happy-faced daughter of the old inn now? Does she sit somewhere, in cap and spectacles, darning socks for her grandchildren, amongst those who never realise that she was once young and handsome? I gave her memory greeting, while I turned my head from her transformed home. Just here I found myself rather alien and astray, but only for a few steps.