Vanishing Roads and Other Essays Part 10

was, after all, the cry of a homesick versifier, thinking "Home Thoughts, from Abroad"; and are Herrick and Wordsworth quite to be trusted on the subject of daffodils?

Well, I am glad to have to own that my revisiting my native land resulted in an agreeable disappointment. With a critical American eye, jealously on my guard against sentimental superst.i.tion, I surveyed the English landscape and examined its various vaunted beauties and fascinations, as though making their acquaintance for the first time.

No, my youthful raptures had not been at fault, and the poets were once more justified. The poets are seldom far wrong. If they see anything, it is usually there. If we cannot see it, too, it is the fault of our eyes.

Take the English hawthorn, for instance. As its fragrance is wafted to you from the bushes where it hangs like the fairest of white linen, you will hardly, I think, quarrel with its praises. Yet, though it is, if I am not mistaken, of rare occurrence in America, it is not absolutely necessary to go to England for the hawthorn. Any one who cares to go a-Maying along the banks of the Hudson, in the neighbourhood of Peekskill, will find it there. But for the primrose and the cowslip you must cross the sea; and, if you come upon such a wood as I strayed into, my last visit, you will count it worth the trip. It was literally carpeted with clumps of primroses and violets (violets that smell, too) so thickly ma.s.sed together in the mossy turf that there was scarcely room to tread. There are no words rich or abundant enough to suggest the sense of innocent luxury brought one by such a natural Persian carpet of soft gold and dewy purple, at once so gorgeous and yet so gentle. In all this lavish loveliness of English wild flowers there is, indeed, a peculiar tenderness. The innocence of children seems to be in them, and the tenderness of lovers.

A lover would not tread A cowslip on the head--

How appropriately such lines come to mind as one carefully picks one's way down a green hillside yellow with cowslips, and breathing perhaps the most delicate of all flowery fragrances. Yet again, as we pa.s.s into another stretch of woodland, another profusion and another fragrance await us, the winey perfume and the spectral blue sheen of the wild hyacinth. As one comes upon stretches of these hyacinths in the woods, they seem at first glance like pools of blue water or fallen pieces of the sky. Here, for once, the poets are left behind, and, of them all, Shakespeare and Milton alone have come near to suggesting the loveliness, at once so spiritual and so warmly and sweetly of the earth, that belongs to English wild flowers. I know not if Sheffield steel still keeps its position among the eternal verities, but in an age when so many of one's cherished beliefs are threatened with the sc.r.a.p-heap, I count it of no small importance to be able to retain one's faith in the English lark and English wild flowers.

But the English countryside is not all greenness and softness, blossomy lanes, moated granges, and idyllic villages. It by no means always suggests the gardener, the farmer, or the gamekeeper. It is rich, too, in wildness and solitude, in melancholy fens and lonely moorlands. To the American accustomed to the vast areas of his own enormous continent, it would come as a surprise to realize that a land far smaller than many of his States can in certain places give one so profound a sense of the wilderness. Yet I doubt if a man could feel lonelier anywhere in the world than on a Yorkshire moor or on Salisbury Plain.

After all, we are apt to forget that, even on the largest continent, we can see only a limited portion of the earth at once. When one is in the middle of Lake Erie we are as much out of sight of land, as impressed by the illusion of boundless water, as if we were in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So, on Salisbury Plain, with nothing but rolling billows of close-cropped turf, springy and noiseless to the tread, as far as the eye can see, one feels as alone with the universe as in the middle of some Asian desert. In addition to the actual loneliness of the scene, and a silence broken only by the occasional tinkle of sheep-bells, as a flock moves like a fleecy cloud across the gra.s.s, is an imaginative loneliness induced by the overwhelming sense of boundless unrecorded time, the "dim-grey-grown ages," of which the mysterious boulders of Stonehenge are the voiceless witnesses. To experience this feeling to the full one should come upon an old Roman road in the twilight, gra.s.s-grown, choked with underbrush, but still running straight and clearly defined as when it shook to the tread of Roman legions. It is eery to follow one of these haunted roads, filled with the far-off thoughts and fancies it naturally evokes, and then suddenly to come out again into the world of today, as it joins the highway once more, and the lights of a wayside inn welcome us back to humanity, with perhaps a touring car standing at the door.

One need hardly say that the English wayside inn is as much a feature of the English countryside as the English hawthorn. Its praises have been the theme of essayists and poets for generations, and at its best there is a cosiness and cheer about it which warm the heart, as its quaintness and savour of past days keep alive the sense of romantic travel. There the spirit of ancient hospitality still survives, and, though the motor-car has replaced the stage-coach, that is, after all, but a detail, and the old, low-ceilinged rooms, the bay windows with their leaded panes, the tap-room with its shining vessels, the great kitchen, the solid English fare, the bra.s.s candlesticks at bedtime, and the lavendered sheets, still preserve the atmosphere of a novel by Fielding or an essay by Addison.

There still, as in Shakespeare's day, one can take one's ease at one's inn, as perhaps in the hostelries of no other land. It is the frequency and excellence of these English inns that make it charmingly possible to see England, as it is best seen, on foot or on a bicycle. It is not a country of isolated wonders, with long stretches of mere road between.

Every mile counts for something. But, if the luxury of walking it with stick and knapsack is denied us, and we must needs see it by motor-car, we cannot fail to make one observation, that of the surprising variety of natural scenery packed in so small a s.p.a.ce. Between Land's End and the Tweed the eye and the imagination have encountered every form of the picturesque. In an area some three hundred and fifty miles long by three hundred broad are contained the ruggedness of Cornwall, the idyllic softness of Devon, the dreamy solitudes of the South Downs, with their billowy, chalky contours, the agricultural fertility of Kent and Middles.e.x, the romantic woodlands and hilly pastures of Surrey, the melancholy fens of Lincolnshire, the broad, bosky levels of the midlands, the sudden wildness of Wales, with her mountains and glens, Yorkshire, with its grim, heather-clad moors, Westmoreland, with its fells and Wordsworthian "Lakes"; every note in the gamut of natural beauty has been struck, from honeysuckle prettiness to savage grandeur.

Yet, although all these contrasts are included in the English scene, it is not of solitude or grandeur that we think when we speak of the English countryside. They are the exceptions to the rule of a gentler, more humanized natural beauty, in which the village church and the ivy-clad ruin play their part. Perhaps some such formula as this would represent the typical scene that springs to the mind's eye with the phrase "the English countryside": a village green, with some geese stringing out across it. A straggle of quaint thatched cottages, roses climbing about the windows, and in front little, carefully kept gardens, with hollyhocks standing in rows, stocks and sweet-williams and such old-fashioned flowers. At one end of the village, rising out of a clump of yews, the mouldering church-tower, with mossy gravestones on one side and a trim rectory on the other. At the other end of the village a gabled inn, with a great stable-yard, busy with horses and waggons.

Above the village, the slopes of gently rising pastures, intersected with footpaths and shadowed with woodlands. A little way out of the village, an old mill with a lilied mill-pond, a great, dripping water-wheel, and the murmur of the escaping stream. And winding on into the green, sun-steeped distance, the blossom-hung English lanes.

XVII

LONDON--CHANGING AND UNCHANGING

I find it an unexpectedly strange experience to be in London again after ten years in New York. I had no idea it could be so strange. Of course, there are men to whom one great city is as another--commercial travellers, impresarios, globe-trotting millionaires. Being none of these, I am not as much at home in St. Petersburg as in Buda-Pesth, in Berlin as in Paris, and, while once I might have envied such plastic cosmopolitanism, I am realizing, this last day or two in London, that, were such an accomplishment mine, it had been impossible for me to feel as deeply as I do my brief reincarnation into a city and a country with which I was once so intimate, and which now seems so romantically strange, while remaining so poignantly familiar. The man who is at home everywhere has nowhere any home. My home was once this London--this England--in which I am writing; but nothing so much as being in London again could make me realize that my home now is New York, and how long and how instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an American. It is not indeed that I love New York and America more than I love London and England. In fact, London has never seemed so wonderful to me in the past as she has seemed during these days of my wistful momentary return to her strange great heart. But this very freshness of her marvel to one who once deemed that he knew her so well proves but the completeness of my spiritual acclimatization into another land. I seem to be seeing her face, hearing her voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my heart is full with unforgotten memories, and my eyes have scarce the hardihood to gaze with the decorum befitting the public streets on many a landmark of vanished hours. To find London almost as new and strange to me as New York once seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted Ghost-Land; to be able to find my way through her streets--in spite of the new Kingsway and Aldwych!--with closed eyes, and yet to see her, it almost seems, for the first time: surely it is a curious, almost uncanny, experience.

Do I find London changed?--I am asked. I have been so busy in rediscovering what I had half-forgotten, in finding engaging novelties in things anciently familiar, that the question is one which I feel hardly competent to answer. For instance, I had all but forgotten that there was so n.o.ble a thing in the world as an old-fashioned English pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with a thrill of recognition, that made a friend with whom I was walking think for a moment that I had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the human heart who cannot realize how tremulous with ancient heart-break may seem an old-fashioned English pork-pie--after ten years in America.

And, again, how curiously novel and charming seemed the soft and courteous English voices--with or without aitches--all about one in the streets and in the shops--I had almost said the "stores." I am enamoured of the American accent, these many years, and--the calumny of superficial observation to the contrary--I will maintain, so far as my own experience goes, that there is as much courtesy broadcast in America as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than in France. Yet, for all that, that something or other in the English voice which I had heard long since and lost awhile smote me with a peculiar pleasure, and, though I like the comradely American "Cap" or "Professor," and am hoping soon to hear it again--yet the novelty of being addressed once more as "Sir" has had, I must own, a certain antiquarian charm.

Wandering in a quaint by-street near my hotel, and reading the names and signs on one or two of the neat old-world "places of business," I came on the word "sweep." I believe it was on a bra.s.s-plate. For a moment, I wondered what it meant; and then I realized, with a great grat.i.tude, that London had not changed so much, after all, since the days of Charles Lamb. As I emerged into a broader thoroughfare, my ears were smitten with the sound of minstrelsy. It is true that the tune was changed. It was unmistakably rag-time. Yet, there was the old piano-organ, and in a broad circle of spectators, suspended awhile from their various wayfaring, a young man in tennis flannels was performing a spirited Apache dance with a quite comely short-skirted young woman, who rightly enough felt that she had no need to be ashamed of her legs.

Across the extemporized stage, every now and then, taxicabs tooted cautiously, longing in their hearts to stay; and once a motor coal-waggon, like a sort of amateur freight-train, thundered across; but not even these could break the spell that held that ring of enchanted loiterers, from which presently the pennies fell like rain--the eternal spell--still operating, I was glad to see, under the protection of the only human police in the world--of the strolling player in London town.

Just before the players turned to seek fresh squares and alleys new, I noticed on the edge of the crowd what seemed, in the gathering twilight, to be a group of uplifted spears. Spears or halberds, were they? It was a little company of the ancient brotherhood of lamp-lighters, seduced, like the rest of us, from the strict pursuance of duty by the vagabond music.

To me this thought is full of rea.s.surance, whatever be the murmurs of change: London has still her sweeps, her strolling minstrels, and her lamp-lighters.

Of course, I missed at once the old busses, yet there are far more horses left than I had dared to hope, and the hansom is far from extinct. In fact, there seems to be some promise of its renaissance, and even yet, in the words of the ancient bard, despite the compet.i.tion of taxis--

Like dragon-flies, The hansoms hover With jewelled eyes, To catch the lover.

Further,--the quietude of the Temple remains undisturbed, the lawns of Gray's Inn are green as of old, the Elizabethanism of Staple Inn is unchanged, about the cornices of the British Museum the pigeons still flutter and coo, and the old clocks chime sweetly as of old from their mysterious stations aloft somewhere in the morning and the evening sky.

Changes, of course, there are. It is easier to telephone in London today than it was ten years ago--almost as easy as in some little provincial town in Connecticut. Various minor human conveniences have been improved. The electric lighting is better. Some of the elevators--I mean the "lifts"--almost remind one of New York. The problem of "rapid transit" has been simplified. All which things, however, have nothing to do with national characteristics, but are now the common property of the civilized, or rather, I should say, the commercialized, world, and are probably to be found no less in full swing in Timbuctoo. No one--save, maybe, the citizens of some small imitative nation--confounds these things with change, or calls them "progress." The soul of a great old nation adopts all such contrivances as in the past it has adopted new weapons, or new modes of conveyance. Only a Hottentot or a Cook's Tourist can consider such superficial developments as evidences of "change."

There are, of course, some new theatres--though I have heard of no new great actor or actress. The old "favourites" still seem to dominate the play-bills, as they did ten years ago. There is Mr. Hammerstein's Opera House in the Kingsway. I looked upon it with pathos. Yet, surely, it is a monument not so much of changing London as of that London which sees no necessity of change.

In regard to the great new roadways, Kingsway, Aldwych, and the broadening of the Strand, I have been grateful for the temper which seems to have presided over their making--a temper combining the necessary readjustment of past and present, with a spirit of sensitive conservation for those buildings which more and more England will realize as having a lasting value for her spirit.

So far as I have observed, London has been guilty of no such vandalism as is responsible for the new Boulevard Raspail in Paris, and similar heartless destructiveness, in a city which belongs less to France than to the human soul. Such cities as London and Paris are among the eternal spiritual possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of them could be forced somehow to remember that, when their brief mayoral, or otherwise official, lives are past, there will be found those who will need to look upon what they have destroyed, and who will curse them in their graves.

Putting aside such merely superficial "changes" as new streets, new theatres, and new conveniences, there does seem to me one change of a far higher importance for which I have no direct evidence, and which I can only hint at, even to myself, as "something in the air." It is, of course, nothing new either to London or to England. It is rather the reawakening of an old temper to which England's history has so often and so momentously given expression. I seem to find it in a new alertness in the way men and women walk and talk in the streets, a braced-up expectancy and readiness for some approaching development in England's destiny, a new quickening of that old indomitable spirit that has faced not merely external dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own internal problems. London seems to me like a city that has heard a voice crying "Arise, thou that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readiness for some new unknown summons of a future that can but develop the glory of her past.

England seems to be no more sleepily resting on her laurels, as she was some twenty years ago. Nor does she seem, on the other hand, to show the least anxiety that she could ever lose them. She is merely realizing that the time is at hand when she is to win others--that one more of those many re-births of England, so to speak, out of her own womb, approaches, and that once more she is about to prove herself eternally young.

New countries are apt to speak of old countries as though they are dying, merely because they have lived so long. Yet there is a longevity which is one of the surest evidences of youth. Such I seem to feel once more is England's--as from my window I watch the same old English May weather: the falling rain and the rich gloom, within which moves always, shouldering the darkest hour, an oceanic radiance, a deathless principle of celestial fire.

LONDON, May, 1913.

XVIII

THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT

Were one to tell the proprietors of the very prosperous and flamboyant restaurant of which I am thinking that it is haunted--yea, that ghosts sit at its well appointed tables, and lost voices laugh and wail and sing low to themselves through its halls--they would probably take one for a lunatic--a servant of the moon.

Certainly, to all appearance, few places would seem less to suggest the word "haunted" than that restaurant, as one comes upon it, in one of the busiest of London thoroughfares, spreading as it does for blocks around, like a conflagration, the festive glare of its electrically emblazoned facade. Yet no ruined mansion, with the moon shining in through its shattered roof, the owl nesting in its banqueting hall, and the snake gliding through its bed chambers, was ever more peopled with phantoms than this radiant palace of prandial gaiety, apparently filled with the festive murmur of happy diners, the jocund strains of its vigorous orchestra, the subdued clash of knives and forks and delicate dishes, the rustle of women's gowns and the fairy music of women's voices. For me its portico, flaming like a vortex of dizzy engulfing light, upon which, as upon a swift current, gay men and women, alighting from motor and hansom, are swept inward to glittering tables of snow-white napery, fair with flowers--for me the mouth of the grave is not less dread, and the walls of a sepulchre are not so painted with dead faces or so inscribed with elegiac memories. I could spend a night in Pere-la-Chaise, and still be less aware of the presence of the dead than I was a short time ago, when, greatly daring, I crossed with a shudder that once so familiar threshold.

It was twelve years since I had been in London, so I felt no little of a ghost myself, and I knew too well that it would be vain to look for the old faces. Yes, gone was the huge good-natured commissionaire, who so often in the past, on my arrival in company with some human flower, had flung open the ap.r.o.n of our cab with such reverential alacrity, and on our departure had so gently tucked in the petals of her skirts, smiling the while a respectfully knowing benediction on the prospective continuance of our evening's adventure. Another stood in his place, and watched my lonely arrival with careless indifference. Glancing through the window of the treasurer's office to the right of the hall, I could see that an unfamiliar figure sat at the desk, where in the past so many a cheque had been cashed for me with eager _bonhomie_. Now I reflected that considerable identification would be necessary for that once light-hearted transaction. It is true that I was welcomed with courtesy by a bowing majordomo, but alas, my welcome was that of a stranger; and when I mounted the ornate, marble-walled staircase leading to the gallery where I had always preferred to sit, I realized that my hat and cane must pa.s.s into alien keeping, and that no waiter's face would light up as he saw me threading my way to the sacred table, withdrawn in a nook of the balcony, where one could see and hear all, partic.i.p.ate in the general human stir and atmosphere, and yet remain apart.

Ah! no; for the friendly c.o.c.kney that once greeted me with an enfolding paternal kindness was subst.i.tuted broken English of a less companionable accent. A polite young Greek it was who stood waiting respectfully for my order, knowing nothing of all it meant for me--_me_--to be seated at that table again--whereas, had he been one of half a dozen of the waiters of yester-year, he would have known almost as much as I of the "secret memoirs" of that historic table.

In ordering my meal I made no attempt at sentiment, for my mood went far deeper than sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the time, I was living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past, I made one heartbroken acknowledgment of the present by beginning with the anachronism of a dry Martini c.o.c.ktail, which, twelve years previous, was unknown and unattainable in that haunted gallery. That c.o.c.ktail was a sort of desperate epitaph. It meant that I was alone--alone with my ghosts. Yet it had a certain resurrecting influence, and as I sat there proceeding dreamily with my meal, one face and another would flash before me, and memory after memory re-enact itself in the theatre of my fancy. So much in my actual surroundings brought back the past with an aching distinctness--particularly the entrance of two charming young people, making rainbows all about them, as, ushered by a smiling waiter, who was evidently no stranger to their felicity, they seated themselves at a neighbouring table with a happy sigh, and neglected the menu for a moment or two while they gazed, rapt and lost, into each other's eyes.

How well I knew it all; how easily I could have taken the young man's place, and played the part for which this evening he was so fortunately cast! As I looked at them, I instinctively summoned to my side the radiant shade of Aurea, for indeed she had seemed made of gold--gold and water lilies. And, as of old, when I had called to her, she came swiftly with a luxurious rustle of fragrant skirts, like the sound of the west wind among the summer trees, or the swish and sway of the foam about the feet of Aphrodite. There she sat facing me once more, "a feasting presence made of light"--her hair like a golden wheat sheaf, her eyes like blue flowers amid the wheat, and her bosom, by no means parsimoniously concealed, literally suggesting that the loveliness of all the water lilies in the world was ama.s.sed there within her corset as in some precious casket. Ours was not one of the great tragic loves, but I know I shall think of Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming I had ordered champagne--we always drank champagne together, because, as we said, it matched so well with her hair--champagne of a no longer fashionable brand. The waiter seemed a little surprised to hear it asked for, but it had been the only _chic_ brand in 19--.

"Look at those two yonder," I said presently, after we had drunk to each other, smiling long into each other's eyes over the brims of our gla.s.ses. "You and I were once as they. It is their first wonderful dinner together. Watch them--the poor darlings; it is enough to break one's heart."

"Do you remember ours?" asked Aurea quite needlessly.

"I wonder what else I was thinking of--dear idiot!" said I, with tender elegance, as in the old days.

As I said before, Aurea and I had not been tragic in our love. It was more a matter of life--than death; warm, pagan, light-hearted life. Ours was perhaps that most satisfactory of relationships between men and women, which contrives to enjoy the happiness, the fun, even the ecstasy, of loving, while evading its heartache. It was, I suppose, what one would call a healthy physical enchantment, with lots of tenderness and kindness in it, but no possibility of hurt to each other. There was nothing Aurea would not have done for me, or I for Aurea, except--marry each other; and, as a matter of fact, there were certain difficulties on both sides in the way of our doing that, difficulties, however, which I am sure neither of us regretted.

Yes, Aurea and I understood thoroughly what was going on in those young hearts, as we watched them, our eyes starry with remembrance. Who better than we should know that hush and wonder, that sense of enchanted intimacy, which belongs of all moments perhaps in the progress of a pa.s.sion to that moment when two standing tiptoe on the brink of golden surrender, sit down to their first ambrosial meal together--delicious adventure!--with all the world to watch them, if it choose, and yet aloof in a magic loneliness, as of youthful divinities wrapped in a roseate cloud! Hours of divine expectancy, at once promise and fulfilment. Happy were it for you, lovers, could you thus sit forever, nor pa.s.s beyond this moment, touched by some immortalizing wand as those lovers on the Grecian Urn:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss.

Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss.

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

"See," said Aurea presently, "they are getting ready to go. The waiter has brought the bill, and is looking away, suddenly lost in profound meditation. Let us see how he pays the bill. I am sure she is anxious."