The Retrospect Part 13

When we drove to the house which commanded "one of the finest views in England"--home of the bride's sister--a rather less density of fog would have answered the purpose, instead of which we had rather more. The house, with its platform and all the lawns and flower-beds and marquees thereon, was quite plain to view; the first terrace was visible; some trees between that and the second tier of garden loomed a shade more substantial than their shadows would have been; below and beyond them--nothing. Nothing, nothing but cotton-wool, a white blanket, a wall impenetrable. Not a glimpse, not a hint of the coombe and sea that M.

had promised me. So that to this day I do not really know how lovely Devonshire can be, although I can imagine that I know.

The visible house had the more attention paid to it, and within it there was much to charm the eye of a wedding guest, apart from the show of wedding presents. Our Norwegian hostess had brought to her English home treasure of furniture and curios that I had to apologise for staring at as if they were things in a museum; ma.s.ses of black wood carved all over, and strange pottery and metal ware, drinking-cups and the like; they brought the Norse country, ere while distant and practically unknown, to sight and touch, and set my unsated traveller's soul a-dreaming of snows and sagas, mountains and fjords.

But the Norwegian wedding-cake was the pride of its nation, amongst them all.

In the large marquee where the dinner-destroying marriage feast was spread, there were two of these nuptial trophies, an English cake crowning one long table, a Norwegian the other. The first was the white, three-tiered, much decorated affair that we are familiar with, and I did not go near it. The bride cut it ceremonially, and it was distributed in the usual way. Then, escorted by her bridegroom, she came across the carpeted tent through the smart crowd to where I stood at the other table. "I must 'break' this cake," she remarked, with her pretty foreign accent, and proceeded to do it with her two hands in what one perceived to be the correct Norwegian bridal fashion. In case the reader is as ignorant of the const.i.tution of Norwegian bridescakes as I was until that afternoon, I will try to describe it.

It may have stood two feet high, but obviously the size would depend on circ.u.mstances, the same as with our own. In shape it resembled the tall bottles, with their horizontal fluting, in which the ready-made salad-dressing of commerce is, or used to be, purveyed, being a sh.e.l.l formed of graduated rings of cake (much like the wooden rings for stretching drawn-thread-work), laid one upon another from bottom to top.

They were as perfectly round and evenly graduated as if the paste had been wound round a cone like cotton on a reel, but that is not how it was done, because each ring was complete in itself and came off whole when the cake was "broken," although previously it had adhered to the rings next to it strongly enough to make the finished erection safe to move and carry. This means, of course, that the stuff is not brittle, but neither is it tough; it bites like a particularly nice macaroon.

When the bride had pulled off the two or three top rings, which were broken into pieces of convenient size before being handed round, the hollow within revealed itself filled up with sweetmeats; and here again the purse or fancy would determine the kind and quality of sweetmeats used. A cake of any size, filled with the best "lollies," as we Australians call them, must be at least as costly as the corresponding English cake, although it may not look so. As it goes down, ring by ring, the miscellaneous internal goodies are distributed to keep the surface even, which certainly makes it the more interesting of the two to partake of; and it can a.s.suredly boast the more cunning cookery. I love a new experience, of whatever sort or kind, and I consider the Norwegian wedding-cake an item of value to my store.

Altogether, I had a good time that afternoon--as usual. Family guests allowed me not a moment to remember that I was a stranger, and I was thrown for a while with a lady--introduced to me with special intention as one who knew Australia--with whom I felt at once like an old friend, although she had known Australia only as a tourist, not as an old-timer like myself. We talked Australia and nothing else, but not quite as another lady, who knew Australia as I knew it, had discussed the subject with me at a Norfolk garden-party. We did not largely comment upon the funniness of these stay-at-home English people, the unconsciousness of the poor dears of how way back behind the times they were, and their extraordinarily mistaken notions about us and what we were accustomed to.

The fog had settled down for the remainder of the day, never having lifted since day broke. It took the bride and bridegroom and their carriage, swallowing them up before our eyes as we cl.u.s.tered about the porch to bid them G.o.dspeed. Soon afterwards we drove away ourselves. The hedgerow ivy and the foamy traveller's joy and the pink valerian were still to be seen on the roadside banks, so close to us as we pounded down the hills. The carriage windows were down, and the white veil floated about us. I watched the gradual wilting of the already discouraged feathers on the hat in front of me, until at last they hung down lank and shiny, little beads of moisture fringing their tips. I had tucked my own feather boa within my wraps, to save it, but when, reaching home, I drew it off in the hall, it was like drawing a wet sponge along my neck and cheek.

"Take them all to the drying-closet," said M. to her maid. And there our wedding garments spent the night, coming forth dry and fuzzy in the morning.

In Australia the drying-closet is not amongst our domestic appliances, although its principles are applied to laundries. We do not need it. But it is the "long-felt want" of every British home. Unfortunately it is the privilege of the well-to-do. Since I am not likely to be able to afford one, I intend not to wear feather boas when I go to live in England.

CHAPTER XV

IN THE GARDEN OF ENGLAND

Twenty years ago--or was it nearer twenty-five?--a dear girl came to live with me as governess-out-of-school to my young children and general aide-de-camp to myself. It was in the time, which spread over so many years, when I was not strong enough for all the domestic duties that properly belonged to me. I got her through an advertis.e.m.e.nt--the only time I was ever beholden to such a source for such an acquisition. "A young English lady" was the attractive description of her--the very thing, to my mind, for my bush-bred infants.

I called on her at the Governesses' Home in Melbourne, and engaged her on the spot. She had come to Australia for her health, but if she told me so I did not grasp the fact; she looked as well and as good as I felt she would be comfortable to get on with. Also she had come from a good English house and a well-to-do and well-placed family, and was choosing to earn her living rather than be an expense to her father, from no compulsion but that of her own independent spirit; and this too was a fact I did not grasp. She never allowed me to perceive it. Had she been penniless, with only her casual employer to depend on, she could not have served me more devotedly. She worked far harder than I should have allowed her to do had I divined the secret weaknesses in her st.u.r.dy-looking little frame, always with bright face and cheerful voice and unslackening energy and interest. She seemed to have no thought for herself at all. And yet she professed, and still vehemently professes, that the time she spent with us was the time of her life.

However in the end she fell ill--very ill; then the secret weaknesses revealed themselves, and the doctor shook his head over them. We saw that governessing days were over, and her relatives were communicated with. Her father sent out money for her needs and for a first-cla.s.s pa.s.sage, and when she seemed able to travel we sent her back to him in the care of a trained nurse. The doctor thought she might live to reach her home, but he was not sanguine.

Well, she did, and is there still, bless her heart. At any rate I trust so, she was a few weeks ago. Although the secret weaknesses seem permanent and she risks her life every winter that she spends in England--unfortunately, the Riviera, subst.i.tute for the more beneficial and beloved Australia, is not always practicable--I antic.i.p.ate that she will be a hale old woman for many years after I am gone.

Through all the long interval between her parting with us at B---- and my meeting with her again, she kept up a loving correspondence, and every letter was a sigh for me to come home or a sigh to be back herself in the sunny land where she had been "so well and happy." I had not the leisure to answer half her letters, but when I was suddenly confronted with the opportunity of my life, and sat down to inform my English friends of the treat in store for them, it was with special satisfaction that I wrote to the one who, I knew, would hail the news with more genuine joy than anybody.

It was not until September that I found time to pay my first visit to her. She lived in Kent, not a hundred miles from Maidstone, to which town she journeyed to meet me--all in the wind and rain which were so bad for the secret weaknesses. Partridges being the only living creatures that my husband was then interested in--they had been available to the gun three days--I went alone. Later on, just before we sailed for home, I went down to her for a last week-end, and he followed to fetch me and to shake hands with her before we left.

On that 4th September when I met her first after the long absence a leading London newspaper made what now seems to me an astounding statement. It declared that "we" had had "the most depressing August ever known in England." All I can say is (and I trust I am not giving a pair of rose-coloured spectacles away) that I have no recollection of the circ.u.mstance. It was not a depressing August to me--I can swear to that--and newspapers are notoriously sensational. "Ever known in England" is absurd on the face of it, as the utterance of a probably young man, and certainly of a man whose memory would not reach even as far as the Coronation of Queen Victoria. But I do remember, and frankly admit, that it was a wet day when I went to Kent for the first time. Not only wet, but cold.

But that only made the home-coming to C.'s hearth and heart the warmer.

Warm I knew it would be, but even the loving correspondence, undiscouraged by its frequent onesidedness, had not prepared me for the discovery I made of my peculiar and permanent place in her regard. Of the many happy experiences of life, few can match that of finding you have been one of the deities of a faithful heart for over twenty years of absence without knowing it. But that was only one of the surprises of the day. Having stupidly missed the significance of first-cla.s.s pa.s.sages and frequent Riviera winters, I had supposed myself bound for the sort of home that you a.s.sume your nursery governess comes from, whereas I arrived at a good country house, with fifty acres of estate to it, the property of her family for generations, and now belonging to her and three sisters jointly; an unpretentious establishment certainly, but handsomely appointed and correctly administered--not like the bush parsonage into which she had fitted herself so una.s.sumingly. When packing in the morning I had rejoiced in the innocence of my heart that, for once, I need not bother myself with a lot of luggage; and I took for my week-end a bag which at a pinch I could have carried in my own hand.

When evening came, and a bare-armed and bare-shouldered guest to meet me, and I had nothing but a short cloth skirt and a high-necked blouse to make a toilet of, I thought of something that an experienced globetrotter, fresh from the West African wilds, had once told me. "One thing I have found," said he: "wherever you go, if you haven't been there before," and he was speaking of the least likely places, "it is never safe to go without your evening clothes." I shall not forget that in future. The irony of fate was in it when C. offered me a black satin dinner-gown of her own. Sad--indeed, wild--as I was to be the one to seem to show disrespect to her house, it was something of a comfort to me to find that I had grown so fat in England (from seven stone five on landing to eight stone two the day before this day) that I could not make it meet by inches. I would sooner go to dinner in my petticoat than wear a st.i.tch of anybody else's--even hers, like a daughter as she was; but I could not damp her loving solicitude by saying so.

She heaped luxuries upon me, even luxuries that she could not afford (because I know just how far a quarter of the income of even a nice estate as this was, in the chronic bad times of British agriculture, would go, and that she supplemented it by selling plants from her garden, and sometimes in other ways). When, after our great gossip over our tea by the drawing-room fire, I went upstairs to make bricks without straw, as it were, in my preparation for dinner, I found my pretty bedroom, in which the fine old mahogany shone like gla.s.s, exhaling her thoughtfulness all over it. In Australia, where your friends' buggies are also their luggage carts, and where railway porters are so precarious, you get into the habit of reducing your travelling kit to the minimum, and a bulky dressing-gown is one of the things that can be done without for a day or two, if you have an overcoat with you. I had left mine behind, and lo! there hung from a chair by my warm fireside a gorgeous robe of silk, embroidered outside, padded within, and beside it a pair of quilted satin shoes to match--to go to my bath with, although a.s.suredly not meant for such humble use. That was the sort of thing.

When a carriage was had all the way from Maidstone, and kept with no regard for the expense of wasted hours, I used the privilege of an old friend and mother to remonstrate with her.

"Oh, _don't_!" her face and voice checked me from doing it again. "If you only _knew_ what this is to me!" Well, I did know, and it was knowledge to make one bless one's luck. How little we are aware of it when we are setting bread upon the waters! I had been absolutely unconscious of responsibility for this which came back to me after so many years.

It was only from Friday afternoon to Tuesday morning that I could stay with her on this occasion. But the best was made of that short time as far as she could manage it. I saw as much as possible of the famed Garden of England. Two months later, when I paid her the second visit, I saw a great deal more. Both times my luck in English weather was "in."

My very first morning in Kent dawned bright and beautiful--after that cold and rainy eve--and the day was all delightful.

We had breakfast in a sunny little sitting-room upstairs, a room with lots of window light, and furniture covered with that calendered chintz, patterned with flowers on a white ground, which is as cheerful to the spirits as to the eye; C. and her sister who lived with her (the other two being married and in their own homes), and my contented self, their guest. Outside were lawn and old trees and plentiful autumn blossom; the sun poured in; a little fire added a final touch of comfort--for I must not be so low as to say it was bloaters and bacon (C. had remembered my talk of English bloaters in the long ago as she had remembered everything).

The admirable meal concluded I was taken a little walk about the place.

The estate had once been devoted to hops, and the back premises of the solid old stone house were encircled by a great wall, broken with the hooded peaks of kilns and lined with immense warehouses, where the crops of the fields used to be treated and stored. Now the kilns were cold and out of gear; the granaries were stores for fruit and ladders and market baskets; and the bulk of the fifty acres of land bore orchards in heavy bearing. I had struck a Kentish fruit farm at apple harvest, which was a sight to see. Waggons were all day loading and driving off with their piles of cases for Covent Garden, yet the army of pickers seemed to make little impression upon the apparently countless millions of apples still rosily shining in the sun. Other fruits were grown, although not to the same extent, and there were lanes and thickets of cob-nut, which I was told is a very profitable commodity, if you have it, but the bushes had failed to bear that season. In view of the growing popularity of vegetarianism, to the charms of which I yielded myself in England, when I found how satisfactorily you could be fed by those who knew how to work the system properly, I advised the sister fruit-farmers to make more of a point of nuts; this was when they mourned sadly over the market price of apples in a good year. I told them how I had spent a week with vegetarians, expecting to be starved, and had been nourished on such rich non-flesh meats that I hardly cared to look at a boiled chicken when I went on to the next house. "Nuts," said I, "that can give you all the feeling of beef and mutton without the gross actuality, have a great future before them. So make haste and start growing them before the other fruit-farmers think of it."

The conformation of this Kentish orchard gave charming views of its several parts, of the pretty, down-dropping village and the distant landscape. There was a slope of applefield, flushed with the colour of its ma.s.sed fruit in the sun, which sank to a lake with swans on it, on the far side of which an old mill dipped its wheel in the water; trees rose steeply behind the mill, and sweet old houses out of the trees. It was the top of hilly ridges of which the bottom was the famous Weald--and a subject for a painter if ever there was one. When I had walked about enough I visited the warehouses and hop kilns that walled the yard; saw F. wading in her sea of graded apples, directing the workmen whose only overseer she was; stood with C. in an empty oast house, while she reconstructed the busy scenes that were no more, the living functions of the idle furnace and flue, shoot and press, and told tales of a childhood beginning to loom away towards the fairyland where now my own abides. "We used to bring potatoes here, and the hop-dryer would bake them for us in the hot ashes"--alas! But why should I say alas? I am convinced--although I was not always convinced--that it is not a matter for repining that we "live but once."

The Maidstone carriage awaited the completion of an early lunch, and for nearly four hours of the lovely afternoon C. showed me the lovely country. I wish there were more adjectives equivalent to "lovely" and "beautiful," that I might not have to use those two so often; but I must express my feelings, and it is not my fault that the language of tongue and pen is so limited. Everything was lovely, and there is no other word for it but beautiful. I had not been to Devonshire then, but I still think the village of Linton, as I saw it in that weather, beyond compare. Not knowing what a Torquay horse could do, I wondered that ours did not take the hill in what seemed the easier way of sliding down it on his haunches; his labour on my account (but when he struggled upward again, by digging his toes into the cobbles provided for the purpose, I walked) was the only drawback to my almost intoxicating enjoyment of England on that day. I had never before seen the country save from the windows of trains, except in the eastern counties. The charms of English hills and dales were fresh. Not that that made any difference in their effect on me. I cannot believe for a moment that familiarity with such beauty could ever lessen the joy of it.

On the brow of Linton Hill I got out to look at the church. I am not, strictly speaking, a churchy person--this being, perhaps, one of the cases where familiarity runs its normal course--but these English reliquaries, with their histories and their architecture, had a fascination that drew me every time I saw a door open. I ran in alone, as I liked to do, while C. reposed in the carriage, conserving her strength, and the poor horse pulled himself together for the descent; and I looked through the chancel screening to that chapel of the Cornwallis tombs, to be almost startled by the white image of death and peace lying there, in cold and cloistered privacy, while without the sun shone so gloriously, and the happy living people basked and played and busied themselves in it, still possessing their lovely world. It was a sharply impressive thing, coming upon such a conjunction unawares.

By the way, I may as well say here that I took no notes of my English experiences at the time of happening, having no idea of writing a book about them, and I may sometimes mix things up. But I think I am certain that it was Linton Church and the Cornwallis monument and this first drive in Kent that went together.

Down that inexpressible village street we drove, past those dreams of old houses--labourers' cottages, as likely as not--which made my mouth water in envy of the labourers, who doubtless scorned them as out of fashion; and then there opened to us the Weald of Kent.

Perhaps I had better not begin upon the Weald of Kent. For one thing, it has been mentioned by other writers--and painters. We have a picture of it in our own Public Gallery in Melbourne. But, O paint! O words!

We meandered about high-hedged, lane-like, tree-shaded roads, which would have reminded me of Devonshire if I had been there first. We climbed the--to the horse with a big landau behind him--awful Hunton Hill (up which I walked). We pa.s.sed Hunton Park, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's old home, or one of them. We called on a friend who gave us tea--_tea_--of a deliciousness commensurate with the craving for it induced by so much fresh air. We skirted many hopfields, in their full late-summer dress. We----

But if I go further I shall be violating the sanct.i.ties of private life by discovering to the public the nest that for the time being sheltered me. Suffice it that that drive was one of the drives of my life.

Our neighbouring town of Maidstone was closely investigated, as a matter of course. That perfect example of a sixteenth-century manor-house which is now the Museum, the far older Archbishop's Palace, magnificent All Saints' Church, and the relics of the historic past in back streets and byways, filled several afternoons with joy. But the country, in that sweetest weather--we did have rain and cold sometimes, but the best was always with me when I wanted it--the outdoor loveliness was the soul-saturating delight. Until as late in the year as I made my last visit this blessed luck held out. In the little pocket-book which contains the brief and only record of my movements at this time, I find the proof that memory is not drawing upon imagination:

"Oct. 30th.--Another gorgeous day, mild, sunny, summery ..."

"Oct. 31st.--Another fine day, although dull in the morning ..."

"Nov. 1st.--Beautiful day ..."

"Nov. 2nd.--Another lovely day ..."

"Nov. 3rd.--Another lovely day. Slightly foggy ..."

"Nov. 4th.--Still lovely, after the usual foggy dawn ..."

And then I think of the sort of weather they had in England the year before and the year after and bear in mind the sort of weather that an Australian is accustomed to!

It was on the 29th October that I went into Kent for the second and last time. That was the occasion when my other sixpenny porter failed me by putting me in the wrong carriage of my train, whereby I found myself at Rochester when C. was waiting for me at Maidstone. When I reached her house (to hear that she was still abroad searching for me) or, rather, when we met at last at the compensating tea-table, and I had leisure of mind to appreciate my surroundings, I thought Kent even lovelier than in the month of hop and apple harvest. My room was abloom with roses from C.'s garden (Madame Abel Chatney is, if I remember rightly, the name of the shaded pink beauty that made so brave a show), and a vase of the blue plumbago that riots like a wild thing in our Australian midsummer heat, but was here coddled in her greenhouse, displayed itself conspicuously on the chimney-piece to "remind me of home." The trees were yellowing and their leaves dropping gently, but the woods had not taken on their full colouring of decay as yet. The mistiness of the soft mornings only made the sunshine (and the breakfast fire in the little morning-room) the sweeter when it shone out.

It was on the "gorgeous day," 30th October, that we went to Malling Abbey.

Another of those villages or little country towns whose charms must inevitably be lost upon those who have always known them. There are houses in Malling (and I found them plentiful elsewhere) standing close upon the street--plain, flat-fronted, absolutely unpretentious, but genuine, dignified, high-bred, if one may use the term, in every inch of them--before which I stood in admiration that I am sure no home-staying English person could understand. Are they the real Queen Anne? Whatever they are they are good taste materialised. And if I could choose a home----

But no; on second thoughts, no--not in an English village or little town, all its loveliness notwithstanding. It is strange that for thirty-eight years the daydream of my partner and myself--an English-bred colonial clergyman's idea of mundane bliss--was just that life; to be "settled" in one of those peaceful and comfortable country rectories such as that in which we began our joint career. It seems to be his dream still, but it is no longer mine. When, on the third Sunday, after our return we walked through the fields and lanes to morning service at W----, and entered the village church (to be stared at by the rustic congregation with as much curiosity as when I wore my wedding bonnet and G. his first canonicals); and when after service we were invited, although we did not stay, to luncheon at the rectory, and saw the house which was our first home, and walked upon the lawn where we played croquet with the young friends who came to see us in our bridal retirement, now all old like us, or dead and gone--it came over me to wonder how it would have been if we had had our hearts' desire and stayed there or in a like place always. I thought of the living life that had been mine, and shuddered inwardly. So I did whenever I looked upon a pretty parsonage house distant from railways and centres of intellectual activity--and I saw so many of them; my first thought was: "Oh, what a sweet home I could have made of this!" My swiftly following second: "What appalling loneliness!" Somehow a bush hut in the Back Blocks does not suggest such isolation for a cultivated mind and a spirit awake to the movements of the world as these stately rectories and vicarages in the small villages of England. One suspects it is not easy to keep awake in them. But I may be wrong.