Ada Cambridge

“ There may have been, in the seats behind, a dozen persons more, who did not in the least disturb me.
We threaded five lovely villages, with much horn-blowing and twisting and turning, before we came to royal Sandringham, which I had already seen, but not on this side of it; every house and church and garden and green and pond and tree was a picture, to raise in my mind the unceasing question: "Why did I never know that England was like this?" I had not forgotten, I had simply never known it. No English person can ever know it so long as he stays at home. ”

“ Well, in Devonshire, at any rate, he had not done so. My spacious room had a great bay of three windows, in which I could sit and batten on beauty to my heart's content. My writing-table stood in one angle, and I could not get on with my letters of a morning for the enchantment of the view. Deep down below me lay a small exquisite lawn (every English lawn is exquisite) , shadowed at one side with fine old trees, and all around with a beflowered wall; the old gardener was always pottering there, shaving the grass a little every day, sweeping up every dead leaf that autumn wind brought down. ”

“ Low on the gleaming water—the two towns linked by the dark thread of the railway embankment, brooded over by that majestic mauve and violet hill—it was a vision of beauty indeed as the light effects changed from moment to moment with the sinking of the gorgeous sun. I could afford no time to dress that night. In my hat, as I was, I snatched a mouthful of dinner, and was up again on deck, to make the most of the short twilight; and so I saw the shadowy last of Suez and more than I expected to see of the canal. ”

“ Dolls were nowhere in the season when he reigned. It was the end of the summer, through which his sunny beauty had been the admiration of the beach and the adoration of his family, that he was snatched from us. The terrace reminded me of one forgotten shadow upon the shining picture of the Past—the black day when father and mother drove away with the little coffin in a closed carriage, to lay him with his baby forerunners in the churchyard at H——, leaving us behind with our governess in a paradise despoiled. Miss W. it was, father's favourite, she of the Rowland's Kalydor-and-ink affair. ”

“ And I ran the right way too, although I did not know it, and although I have a natural genius for taking wrong ones; up and down stairs and along devious passages, sped by the directing fingers and shouts that answered my gasping query to every railway man I passed; and so I came out on a high gallery in the great arena of Paddington Station—to see my train below me, but still far away, and the big clock that was my rendezvous with the luggage porter (nowhere to be seen) pointing to the very minute that the time-table fixed for its departure! ”

“ York Cottage on its sunny slope; the charming rectory, its French windows open to the view of its ideal surroundings; the baby's grave in mother earth under the wall of the family church, the pathetic family memorials within—above all, that plate let into one end of the family pew, which I could not bear to see anyone look at who was not a "mother dear," bereaved of her grown son, like me—each and all are the picture gallery of Memory, that blessed haunt of the soul in the aging years. ”

“ Being in Devonshire I sat down on one of the most notoriously beautiful of all the beauty spots of the county. It was traditional that the old gentleman of the island who had had several homes, and the means to make them what he would, never had one in a place that was not beautiful. The island, as I knew, was beautiful, in its wild solitude of sea and sand and ti-tree scrub. Otherwise his family home in England was as great a contrast to the home in which he had chosen to spend his last years as could possibly be found. ”

“ The children who go out into the world have, and must have, a wider grip of affairs than the parent who stops at home. They are better able, as well as willing, to keep up with the times; and, as in other families, it is the elder-sisterly leadership that the younger sister follows. Although we Australians have cherished the belief that England, in all her manifestations, sets the perfect standard for us, I see now that it is America we have copied, insensibly to ourselves, in the arts that make for the comfort and convenience and contingent elegance of everyday life. ”

“ It basks again in such English sunshine as an old Australian could not credit without seeing it; it revels in those summer woods, with their peeps of purple heathland, their pheasants tranquilly meandering in and out amongst the rhododendrons. In those miles of shaven lawn, like a continuous carpet, with their ornamentation of single trees and clumps, their dells and rockeries and lake and pretty nooks, all so flawless; in the delightful garden beds and bowers, that are still so simply English, flowering hardily in the open air ”

“ 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 ménage. 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 glass, 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. ”

“ The dark nights up in that attic bedroom, when the wintry wind bore the heart-thrilling plaints of homesick lions and tigers—so awfully close to one! Oh, suppose they should get out! I have never been conspicuously strong-minded when alone in the dark—I have too much imagination—and I used to burrow deep down in the bedclothes to shut out those appallingly suggestive sounds.
Time seems to deal tenderly with everything in England, and the two old gates were the very same old gates, apparently. ”

“ Although it was July we had a fire all the time—the little touch that made us kin, my cousin and me. The old prejudice against lighting a fire after spring cleaning or before a certain fixed date in autumn, coincident with the exchange of lace window-curtains for stuff ones, or some such annual domestic rite, had not died out in rural England since I had been away; but here—as soon as I walked in out of the rain on the afternoon of my arrival—the sight of a ruddy blaze, and a well-furnished tea-table beside it, told me that in this remote village I had struck an enlightened woman. ”

“ They drove me into the lane and, scrambling down, I ran up the path through the churchyard, glancing from side to side at the same old tombstones and grassy mounds, numbering baby graves of our own household amongst them, every one with its memories of Sunday loiterers sitting and standing about until all friends had passed and the bells had stopped; and my objective was a rood-screen, which not only had a lively story to it, but had persuaded me in the course of years that it was possibly a treasure of ecclesiastical art worth finding by one now educated to know its value. ”

“ And the mistletoe, of which I spoke just now—oh, the mistletoe! What was not enshrined for us in that insignificant bit of weed! Two leaf blades and one berry were enough to work the charm—to turn a humdrum house into a world of romance, filled with the interest of that passion which is the most interesting thing in life, without its carking cares and its deadly responsibilities. Like a trap in the run of a wild animal, a pale sprig would be hidden for special purposes by a more ardent player of the game, but that was considered to be a breach of rules ”

“ The children had grown too old to be taken; moreover, they had attained to wills of their own and did not wish to go. One had fallen to the scythe of the indiscriminate Reaper, and that immense loss dwindled all other losses to nothing at all. I cared no more where I lived, so long as the rest were with me. In England my father and mother, who had so longed for me, as I for them, were in their graves; no old home was left to go back to. I was myself a grandmother, in spite of kindly and even vehement assurances that I did not look it ”

“ My hostesses kept a doll for me. I never took it home—it lived in a drawer in their spare bedroom—but it was brought out as soon as I arrived, together with such odds and ends of material as were available at the moment; and down I sat to reclothe the puppet anew, in a costume of fresh design, the completion of which would synchronise with the call of parent or nurse to fetch me home. Now, when a houseful of grown-ups has a child to entertain for many hours at a stretch, what labour and strain to keep it amused and happy! ”

“ Well, America can afford to forgive everything, and she has forgiven everything, now, while only gratitude is due from us who, remaining in the bosom of the family, are so faithfully done by and cared for. All I am trying to say is that experience teaches knowledge, that love which is not blind is the love best worth having, and that we, with that knowledge and that love, are more competent to appreciate England than she to appreciate us. ”

“ There was no dirt in Exeter Cathedral to dim its complete and finished loveliness, and all its surroundings were in character and keeping with it, "composed" by time and circumstance to make the picture perfect—especially on a golden autumn day. What should be the cast of mind of a bishop privileged to live in such a house and grounds as lie, peaceful and stately and exquisite, under the shadow of the south tower? I like to remember that one bishop of Exeter had a son who was the father of my Eden Phillpotts, whose intellectual inheritance is the love of beauty, uncloistered, unsophisticated ”

“ The social evening, in those old days, began after the five-o'clock tea and ended with the nine-o'clock supper. This was a great meal, always. The cloth was spread for it as for dinner, and chairs drawn up and carving-knives flourished. The cold joint, with pickles, cold fowl, meat pie, the occasional crab or lobster, the cucumber in its season, any left-over trifles of sweet pastry and creams, cheese—with beer, of course—that was the meal which our forebears found it possible to sleep on, and (which is much more surprising) some of their descendants enjoy without discomfort to this day. ”

“ Passing 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. ”

“ From kitchen to parlour, from parlour to bedroom the lady custodian had to make pilgrimages through ruins open to the sky and up stairways and along tunnel-passages such as one shuddered to think of in connection with dark nights. Imagine the wind rising after you have gone to bed, sighing and sobbing like ghosts of tortured captives come back to the scene of their Mediæval woes, whistling through the loopholes like the arrows of a besieging army. ”

“ They gave us a delicious tea, strawberries and raspberries (what a strawberry summer that was! I had never had quite as many as I could eat before) , with unlimited cream, and thin bread-and-butter, and cakes of melting richness; and I was in the pink of health, when nothing could hurt me. After tea we strolled about the garden, grandfather's own old garden, and the dear little great-great-grandson, who as a memory can hold his own with all the ghosts behind him, ran hither and thither to gather flowers for me until I was loaded up with more than I could carry. ”