Amazing Grace Part 34

"It will be unpleasant--this period of mourning that we shall have to affect--for his sake," she went on, "but it is out of respect for the neighborly proprieties, after all."

Mrs. Montgomery was looking at us all in turn, in some little perplexity, when a sudden recollection came to me of how difficult it is sometimes to amalgamate guests--no matter how many rooms there are to one's house.

"And I'll defer my visit until later?" I suggested.

She instantly smiled across at me.

"Just a few days--if you don't mind, dear," she said. "I had planned so many delightful things for _your_ stay--and I know that you wouldn't enjoy the period of mourning."

"Not so much as you would if you had known Lord Erskine!" her husband put in wickedly. "And I'm determined to mourn only the briefest time possible."

"Not an hour later than Sat.u.r.day!" his wife promised generously--and a few hours afterward when they put me down at Charing Cross and sent me whirling away to a lady-like hotel in Bloomsbury, it was with spoken, written and pantomime directions as to which trains, and what-timed trains--and _how many_ trains I was to take toward the end of the week to get to Bannerley.

In the meanwhile I knuckled down devotedly to London--and sent my deductions home across seas, in neatly typed packets, to _The Oldburgh Herald_.

CHAPTER XVI

LONDON

What can't be appreciated can always be ridiculed--whether it's Old Masters, new waltzes, or a wife's Easter bonnet--and this is the reason we have always had such reams of journalistic "fun" at the expense of the broad English "a" and the narrow English view.

For my part, I consider that--next to the French in New Orleans--the English in England are the golden-ruliest people to be found in profane history.

You'll find that they're "insular" only when they're traveling off their dear island--and it's homesickness, after all, which makes them so disagreeably arrogant.

To be sure, the Frenchman in New Orleans will, if you ask him for a word of direction toward the Old Absinthe House, take you into his private office, draw for you a diagram of the whole city, advise you at length not to go unescorted into the Market, then follow you to the door with the final warning: "And it would be well for you to observe a certain degree of caution, my dear young lady, for our city is filled with wickedness, and your eyes are--_pardon?_--most charming!"

This is delightful, of course, and by far the most romantic thing in the way of adventure America has to offer, but rambling around London presents a dearer and more home-like charm.

The Englishman who directs you to a church, or a university square, stops to say nothing about your eyes--much less would he mention the existence of good and evil--but he points out to you the tomb, or chained Bible, or famous man's pew you are seeking, then glides modestly away before you've had time to say: "It's awfully good of you to take all this trouble for a stranger!"

But the truth of the matter is that you don't in the least feel yourself a stranger in London, and you like your kindly Englishman so cordially that you secretly resolve to put a muzzle on your own particular cannon cracker the next Fourth of July.

The shilling guide-books speak of London as the "gray old grandmother of cities," meaning thereby to call attention to her upstart progeny across the seas, but to my mind the t.i.tle of grandmother is much more applicable on account of the joyous surprises she has shut away in dark closets.

One of the main pleasures of a visit to any grandmother is the gift of treasure which she is likely to call forth mysteriously from some tightly-closed cupboard and place in your hands for your own exclusive possession--and certainly this old dingy city outgrannies granny when it comes to that.

In the dingiest little book-stall imaginable, lighted by a candle and tended by a ragged-cuffed gentleman with a pa.s.sion for Keats, you may find the very edition of something that college professors in your native town are offering half a year's salary for! You buy it for five dollars--which seems much more insignificant when spoken of by the pound--then run out and hail the nearest cab, offering the chauffeur an additional shilling to get you out of the neighborhood in ten seconds! Your heart is thumping in guilty fear that the ragged-cuffed gentleman with the pa.s.sion for Keats may discover his mistake and run after you to demand his treasure back!

You make a similar escape, a few hours later, with a Wedgwood tea-caddy, whose delicate color the pottery has never been able to duplicate--and with Sheffield plate your suit-case runneth over!

And your emotions while doing all this? Why, you've never before known what "calm content" could mean.

In the first place, you never feel countrified and unpopular in London, as you do in New York. Your clothes have a way of brightening up and looking noticeably smart as if they'd just enjoyed a sojourn at the dry cleaner's--and everybody you meet seems to care particularly for Americans. You are at home there--not merely with the at-home feeling which a good hotel and agreeable society give--but there's a feeling of satisfaction much deeper than this. Something in you, which has always known and loved England, is seeing familiar faces again--the something which made you strain your eyes over _Mother Goose_ by firelight years ago, and thrill over _Ivanhoe_ and anything which held the name "Sherwood Forest" on its printed page.

It's something congenial--or prenatal--who knows?

(Oh yes! I answer very readily "Present!" when any one calls: "Anglomaniac!")

It was only natural that I should let my adoration for Great Britain show through in the copy I sent home to _The Oldburgh Herald_, and as if to prove that honesty is the best policy, I received a letter of praise from Captain Macauley.

"Anybody can run a foreign country down," he wrote, "but you've proved that you're original by praising one! Stay there as long as you have an English adjective left to go upon, then forget your sorrows, chase away down to Italy and show us what you can do with 'bellissimo.'"

But I didn't do this, for the letter overtook me only after I had reached Bannerley, and was seeing things which I could hope for no words, either English or Italian, to describe.

I left London on Friday--which I ought to have had better sense than to do, having been properly brought up by a black mammy--hoping to reach the home of my shipboard friends early enough Sat.u.r.day morning to hear the pigeons coo under the eaves of Bannerley Hall. All my life I had cherished an ambition to hear pigeons coo under eaves of an ancestral place, and with this thought uppermost in my heart, I packed my suit-case and drove to Paddington Station. I received my first damper at the ticket window.

"Bannerley?" the agent repeated, looking at me with a shade of pity, as I mentioned my destination. "Bannerley?"

"Certainly, Bannerley!" I insisted, with some effort toward a dignified bearing, but the first glance at his doubtful face caused my spirits to sink. Being by nature an extremist, they sank to the bottom. All in a twinkling the cooing of pigeons in my mental picture was changed to the croaking of ravens. "It's not so very difficult to get to Bannerley, is it?"

He scratched his head.

"No-o--not in a general way, miss, but there ain't no telling _when_ you'll get there."

I drew back, more hurt than angry.

"But my friends have already warned me that I shall have to change at Leamington--and Manchester--and Oldham--and----"

"Can't help that!" he exclaimed heartlessly, looking over my shoulder at the line of waiting tourists. "Since the coal strike, trains on them side-lines has been as scarce and irregular as a youngster's teeth at shedding time."

I tried to smile politely, but another glance at his face showed me that he wasn't expecting such an act of supererogation.

"Getting off into the unbeaten paths sounds pretty enough in a guide-book," he kept on hastily, "but the first thing you do when you meet an unbeaten path is to want to beat it!"

I faded out of the line and let my successor take my place.

"He's just an old grouch!" I told myself consolingly, as I got a seat next a window. "Nothing really terrible can befall you when traveling--if you've got a Masonic pin on your coat!"

(One of my Christie relations had thus decorated me and a.s.sured me.)

Then I forgot all about his gloomy warnings, for the train rumbled across a thousand street crossings--then out into all the sheep pastures in the civilized world, and--it was summer!

"This country _must_ be Kent!" I mused, not geographically, but esthetically certain--as soft feathery green broke off occasionally into a pollard-trimmed swamp--then came up again a little later into a gentle, sheep-dotted rise. And I remembered the d.u.c.h.ess once more--"A stalwart, fair-haired lover, and a dozen Kentish lanes!"

I have lived to learn that this is common to Americans who have been brought up to understand that Kent is the garden-spot of England. No matter at which point along the entire coastline they may board a train, their first conviction upon seeing suburban scenery is that it _must_ be Kent! (I say "suburban" advisedly, for none of it is far enough away from the other to be rural.)

So my journey through an elongated and rather circuitous Kent kept my mind away from the croakings of the ticket seller at Paddington--until the next morning at daybreak, when I found myself put down with mournful ceremony at a little wayside station which ought to have been labeled "St. Helena."

"Just as sorry as you are, miss, but this is your nearest hope for a train to Bannerley!" the guard said, by way of an appropriate farewell, so off I got.

"But this place is surely named St. Helena," I groaned, as I looked about me, yet the only actual similarity was in the matter of its being entirely surrounded. The island entirely surrounded by water, of course--this station entirely surrounded by land. I believe that I had never before in my life seen such a stretch of unimproved property!

"'The woods and I--and their infinite call,'" I quoted, as I looked out somewhat shamefacedly across the acres. For it was exactly the kind of place I had always longed to possess for my very own--yet here I had arrived at it, and might, for all I knew to the contrary, take possession of it by right of discovery--yet I was feeling lonely and resentful at the very start.