Uppingham by the Sea Part 2

But what the eye reposes on at last is the broad floor of marsh-land between mountain and sea. A broad smooth floor, which would be vacant and dull enough had not Nature taken thought to drape its formlessness the more lovingly and richly. She has unrolled on it a carpet of various and solemn-tinted stuffs, where pale breadths of rusted bents sometimes mellow into strips of verdurous pasture, sometimes deepen into belts of embrowned peat-beds, sometimes take a yellower barrenness in parched flats, still briny and unreclaimed, and s.h.a.ggy with bristling reeds. It is a wilderness, but not unrelieved with here and there an oasis, where, like islands left high and dry in a deserted ocean bed, one and another rocky knoll lift up above the waste flats around them some acres of sweet gra.s.s, or a broad field of flowering mustard, shining with a splendour as of cloth of gold, and fringed with a loop or two of silver braid by the river winding at the base. There is animate life, too, sprinkled not stintedly over its surface, not only of visitant sea-fowl from the sh.o.r.e, or solitude- loving creatures native to the place--plover and duck and long-winged herons, but also of cattle and horses grazing on the cultivated edges of the marsh, which make us look for the homes of their human masters at no great distance. Why there they are, lying overlooked at our feet all the while, a straggle of lowly white-roofed dwellings clinging to the long pebble ridge like barnacles on a rock, breathing a thin smoke from their scattered chimneys, whence the blessed smell of peat-fires is wafted through the dry air to our nostrils. But one great house I notice with a crowd about its door-steps, and a flag waving over them a device I have somewhere seen before, where the kitchen chimney smokes with a most hospitable volume; guests must be plenty there. Yes; and if further signs of life be needed, you may listen to the puff of a farmer's steam-engine planted in the swamp, and see the glitter of the steel ropes, with which it draws its ploughshares, resistless as fate, through the oozy fallows. Well, if it is come to this, the farmers and their engines will soon civilise away the beauty of this romantic wild. But shall we complain? If they have begun to drain these intractable marshes, then there is a chance for other places, where the interest on the cost of drainage will be less problematical than here.

CHAPTER VI.--MAKESHIFTS.

[Greek text].

From our chapter on the geographical features of our settlement we pa.s.s on to describe how the settlers were housed and organised.

If a school be an inst.i.tution for teaching purposes, its school-room and cla.s.s-rooms should be the most essential portion of its plant. Without discussing the adequacy of the definition, we will begin with these. We were not ill provided; with an exception or two, the rooms appropriated for cla.s.s-rooms answered the purpose well. Some of them were s.p.a.cious; the rest were large enough for the wants of the cla.s.ses, limited to an average of twenty. Nor would a Government Inspector have justly measured this adequacy by the "cubic capacity," if he failed to take into account the exhilarating five minutes' breathing time upon the beach, at eleven o'clock. There was a rare pleasure in those moments of escape from Greek verbs to the sparkle of the tide and the scent of the sea breeze.

What Germans call the "real" subjects, were also provided for. The modern languages were taught mostly in the cla.s.s-rooms of the cla.s.sical masters. Music took up her quarters in several scattered dwellings.

Wales is the home of song, and our musicians were very welcome to make the cottage walls resound to violin or key-board. We remember well the affectionate reverence with which one aged custodian spoke of the "piana.s.s" she was proud to house; she cherished them as if they had been tame elephants. Several concerts were given during our stay--but in the a.s.sembly Rooms of Aberystwith; our wooden school-room was found, on the first experiment, unfit for the purpose, from the want of resonance. The makeshift gymnasium and carpentery, in the stables and coach-house, have been mentioned before. If among "real studies" we may include the cricket, this was, as we saw, well cared for; while the instructor in swimming had nothing to complain of, with four miles of good beach, and the Irish Channel before him.

If the accommodation during school hours was adequate, it was less easy to find elbow-room for the boys at other times. It was well enough from May to August under the ample roof of blue summer weather; but in the rainy season (and at Borth, as elsewhere, that winter was a wet one) we should have been sorely cramped but for relief afforded by the "studies"

noticed in a previous chapter. It is time we should describe them.

Studies they were not, in the sense in which the word is understood at Uppingham, where a school law declares that "a boy's study is his castle," and confers upon him what Aristotle calls the "unspeakable"

delight of the "sense of private property." At Borth this could not be.

In very rare cases was a room the one and indivisible belonging of a single owner; often as many as six shared the table and fireplace. Some of these tenements had at least the less solid merit of looking picturesque. Peeping into a Welsh interior, with its stone kitchen-floor, polished wainscoting, and oak furniture, its walls hung with German prints of imaginative battle-pieces and Nonconforming worthies, and its kitchen-dresser with ranks of ancestral crockery, vivid in light and colour, which catches the eyes first of all things through the open door, "This," one was tempted to cry, "were the study for me!

Here would I sit in the shelter of the wooden screen which keeps away draughts and noisy company, and turn the pages of my Livy for the tale of Cincinnatus, and deeds of rustic heroes; or hear old Horace descant on the gracious simplicity of life among the Sabines."

The boys thought quite otherwise. The kitchen was generally the last room to be chosen. Perhaps the idyllic attractions did not balance the drawback of living in the thoroughfare of the house. Nor could one fail to sympathise with those who preferred the garret, a poor thing but their own, in which two studious souls could hob-n.o.b, or even the austere whitewash, narrow skylight, and n.i.g.g.ard dimensions of some monastic cell, which held just the one student, his table, and his books. The editor of the School Magazine, writing a month after our arrival, finds it "a queer new feeling to do the old work in a strange place, to miss the accustomed pictures on the walls, the accustomed column of books rising on either hand--even the familiar table-cloth and carpet, and to sit instead inside the framework of a six-foot bed, with roof and walls forming the queerest possible combinations of lines and angles, and hung with three different patterns of paper." To woo the muses in a garret is the common fate of genius; but most of the "students" (for so their landladies, misled by a name, called the occupants of a study) were better off than this literary gentleman. When fires came to be lighted in the winter, there was a cheerful domesticity in the sight of the red coals, which is unknown to the solitude of Uppingham studies, with their hot-water pipe that warms but not exhilarates. In particular, one cheery well-furnished parlour, where a blazing hearth threw its light over the well-worn bindings of a select library brought with us from the Sixth-Form-room, and on the well- contented faces of its two custodians, burns as a bright spot in our memory of those winter days.

Thus we managed things even better than if we had listened to another ingenious writer, with whose proposal we will close this topic. It was this: "Let two hundred bathing-machines be brought together from Llandudno and other watering-places within reach, and ranged along the beach. Let one machine be a.s.signed to each boy, and let them be filled up with book-shelves, table, chairs, &c. Thus the whole difficulty will be solved in a moment. And the plan has this further advantage, that when the time comes for returning to Uppingham, the bathing-machines would be simply formed in line, and driven across the country to Rutlandshire, and all further trouble in the way of furniture-vans and families-removing be cut away at one stroke."

CHAPTER VII.--THE COMMISSARIAT.

_To feed were best at home_.

MACBETH.

[Greek verse]

ILIAD IX.

PRINCE HENRY. _Doth it not show vilely in me to desire small beer_?

POINS. _Why_, _a prince should not be so loosely studied as to remember so weak a composition_.

PRINCE HENRY. _Belike then my appet.i.te was not princely got_; _for_, _by my troth_, _I do now remember the poor creature_, _small beer_.

_But_, _indeed_, _these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness_.

2 HENRY IV.

"Who ought to take the command, in the event of anything happening to your lordship?" asked Wellington's officers on an occasion in the Peninsular War. "Beresford," the great strategist answered, after reflection. And then, in answer to their surprised looks: "If it were a question of handling troops, some of you fellows might do as well, perhaps better than he; but what we now want is someone to _feed_ our men." {46}

This story, and the countenance of the epic and royal personages of our mottoes, is our excuse for pa.s.sing on to treat of the ign.o.ble topic of knives and forks, and to describe how three times a day our colony was fed. It is a topic which could not be left outside a narrative which seeks to "show how fields were won."

If our readers will follow the master of the week as he makes his round of the tea-tables at a quarter to seven on a winter evening, he will witness a cheerful scene not wanting in picturesqueness. The vista of the corridor is filled with three very long and very narrow tables, and the boys of as many houses seated at them. The subdued light, which streams from numerous but feeble oil-lamps through the atmosphere of fragrant vapour steamed up by the tea-urns, falls with Rembrandtesque contrast of light and shadow on the long ranks of faces. There is that hum of quiet animation which seems always to exhale along with the aroma of the Chinese leaf. From the urn, where the house matron mounts guard up to the Sixth Form end of the table, where the head of the house is jotting down the list of absentees from the roll-call, the cloth is thickly studded with the viands in tins and jars, rich and various in colour, with which the schoolboy adds succulence to his meal. We open a door out of the dim corridor, and enter a room with three more houses seated round its walls. The sense of animation rises with the warmth and brightness of the fire which roars in the grate. We collect the lists, and move on to another and another room, till we have seen the last of the eleven houses in a severely simple servants'-hall on the bas.e.m.e.nt floor. Thence we return to the wind and rain outside.

If we came here at dinner-time, we should see the housemaster at the head of his table, and his wife or members of his family at the other end. The scene would be quite wanting in the picturesque, but no sense of comfort would make amends for it. For it is dark, especially in the centre of the corridor, and the carver of those vast joints never knows when he will strike his elbow against the walls or pa.s.sers-by; while the incidence of draughts is clearly enough defined by here and there a coat- collar turned up in self-defence; for neither the gla.s.s front door, nor the wooden porch, nor our ma.s.sive porter can effectually keep out the weather. Dinner here is a stern bit of the day's work, to be discharged with a serious fort.i.tude.

We have described how we eat, but said nothing yet of what was eaten. Yet our practical narrative cannot ignore the matter. Certain delicate subjects, however, are best treated dialectically, and perhaps we could not here do better than record a dialogue which we think we must have overheard between Grumbler and Cheerful, two dramatic characters not unknown to readers of the School Magazine some year ago:

_Cheer_. Have you read that jolly letter in _The Times_, on "Uppingham by the Sea?"

_Grumb_. Yes, I have; and the writer says, "The commissariat was on the whole good." I must say that surprises me.

_Cheer_. Why where was it at fault, then?

_Grumb_. Where? It was at fault all round. Look at the puddings--everlastingly smoked!

_Cheer_. Yes; but the commissariat is not puddings.

_Grumb_. Well then, the coals--all chips and small dust; at least, when there _were_ any.

_Cheer_. But the commissariat is not coals.

_Grumb_. Then the cold plates your gravy froze on!

_Cheer_. My good fellow, who ever heard of hot plates on a picnic?

_Grumb_. How about the vegetables then, that never came to table except to make believe there was something in the Irish stew? or what do you call the thing they sometimes served out for b.u.t.ter?

_Cheer_. Ah! well! "a rose by any other name"--you know the rest. But still, the commissariat isn't bad because the b.u.t.ter was so sometimes.

_Grumb_. Oh! of course, you can say the Commissariat (if you spell it with a big C) doesn't mean the meat, or the soup, or the puddings, or the greens, or the b.u.t.ter, or the coals, or the rest of it--but if it isn't these, I should like to know what it is.

_Cheer_. (_loftily_). My good friend, it is easy for you to say this thing or the other was not to your fancy, but it was not quite so easy a matter for our landlord to provide a daily supply of meat, bread, and dairy stuff for some four hundred people; especially as it had to be organised for the occasion, without previous experience. I take it if you knew how the farmers had to be coaxed to sell us their b.u.t.ter, how green things couldn't be had in the markets for love or money, and if you knew how many miles of railway those beeves travelled to and fro between pasture, slaughter-house, and kitchen, before their weary joints rested on our table, I say you would thank the commissariat that you hadn't something worth grumbling about. I am glad we never were on famine rations. I asked to live, not to live well.

_Grumb_. (_a trifle ashamed, but dogged_). Why, of course, I don't mean to say things might not have been worse. Still I stick to it, they were not nice.

_Cheer_. But you'll admit the commissariat did its work: the army was fed. After all, the proof of a pudding is _not_ the eating of it, it is how you feel after it. Now, people are not starved who look the strong healthy fellows ours did when they went home after the first term of it. No 'famine marks' in those firm, brown faces, eh? And then, tell me, did the Rutland pastures ever yield such juicy mutton, or flow so abundantly with milk?

_Grumb_. Enough, enough; you have it. Only I won't be told I was revelling in comfort when I was doing nothing of the kind. I'll bear it, but I won't grin and say I like it; I'll say nothing against it if it's better not, but I shan't say what is untrue in favour of it.

[_Exeunt arm-in-arm_.]

Our two interlocutors fairly exhaust the facts of the case between them, and the historian, who can serve no purpose by trying to think things better or worse than they were, will silence neither. We give our honest praise to the organisers of the food supply for their effectual performance of a very heavy, vexatious, and precarious task, the scale of which we have been brought by inquiry to estimate at its true magnitude.

At the same time we will spare such sympathy as the dignity of the matter demands for the sufferers from tough beef, tub b.u.t.ter, smoked puddings, cold potatoes, and congealed gravy, and not mislead any refugee schoolmaster of the future into the belief that he can dine in the wilderness as comfortably as in Pall Mall.