Part 8 (1/2)

It was hard to tear myself from these eloquent memorials, which I was looking upon for the first time, as doubtless it was the last. All around the little graveyard was green country--that lovely English green of velvet gra.s.s and n.o.ble trees which, after a month of it, was still an ever-fresh rapture to my Australian eyes. ”An unproductive waste,” it was said to have been, prior to the famous underdraining and claying; could my grandfather have seen it with me, he would have felt satisfied with his work, although not a town, or a railroad, or even a telegraph wire, was in sight.

But there was the little church to revisit yet--another shrine of memory. As I walked up the aisle and looked about me, I saw that in half-a-century the hand of change had scarcely touched it. It was a new church, with the exception of the Norman doorway, when I made its acquaintance as a child taken there by its nurse, and it started with the open benches and stencilled walls that were novelties of fas.h.i.+on then. There they were, the same, to the very pattern and hues of the mural decoration, which showed no sign either of renewal or decay. The armorial s.h.i.+elds (to the memory of pious benefactors, doubtless), painted in their proper colours, that made a cornice to the little apse that formed the chancel, were each in its old place, tilted forward at the same angle; I recognised them all. Many a tedious hour had they relieved, as pictures to be studied and puzzled over--the breed of the various heraldic animals, the reasons of their parti-coloured coats and antic att.i.tudes, and so on.

And what a procession of quaint figures pa.s.sed before me as I stood at the upper end, where we had our family pew, and looked down at the open door through which the dead and gone flocked in! The aged labourers, soaped and oiled, in their clean smock-frocks with the wonderful st.i.tchery on back and front; the neat old women, who unwrapped their church books from their clean pocket-handkerchiefs when service began, and wrapped them up again as soon as it was over; the village dressmaker, who sat just behind us, and whose stylish costumes I used to study through the back of our seat while kneeling on my ha.s.sock the reverse way to her--memorable chiefly for puffy white muslin undersleeves that were kept up with elastic which showed when she covered her face with her hands, and had wristbands with black velvet run through the holes in them; the organist at his little instrument near the entrance (it is in another place now, and is not played by turning a handle, as in his time); the inevitable schoolmaster with his indispensable long cane; the servant girls and their swains, the numerous child cousins, etc., etc.--a throng of ghosts. But there was one great and sensational event connected with my early attendances at this church, matching that of the raven in the other, only in this case tragedy instead of comedy; and I was looking at it the whole time, as at a cinematograph reproduction of the living scene.

A young curate (as usual at the unimportant afternoon services) was preaching--how plainly I see him, with his pallid, tawny face and soft black eyes--and suddenly stopped dead and stood still, simply staring at the congregation. ”Oh,” I thought, staring back at him from my commanding position below, ”what news to take home to father and mother, that Mr H. has done this funny thing!” He was recently from India, recruiting delicate health, which was already the anxious care of the ladies of the parish, who sent broths and jellies to his lodgings and coddled him at their homes as often as he would come to them. My mother and M.'s mother were his chief friends, and we children, with whom he had played, were very fond of him. Still it was pure enjoyment to me to see him stop in the middle of his sermon, and to realise that he was not going to finish it. Poor fellow! It was the end of his preaching and of his work. He said, after that long, exciting pause--the words are as unforgettable as Canon W.'s ”Bong on to him!”--”I must crave your indulgence, for I can get no further.” With that he fell and disappeared. Some men rushed from their seats, dragged him out of the pulpit, and carried him, insensible, from the church; and the congregation broke up and scattered, we hurrying home at a run to tell the news. My mother at once put on her bonnet and went away to nurse him. All the village ladies became his mothers from that day until his death, when the whole parish wept and wailed for him and refused to be comforted. His memory was canonised amongst us. A memoir of him was published by his unknown kindred, containing a steel-engraved portrait (not a bit like him, for it made him fair and fat), and, scattered through the latter pages, allusions to ”Mrs H.C.” and ”Mrs F.C.”

rendered the book peculiarly precious to two of the bereaved families.

The only way that succeeding curates could make themselves tolerable was by confessing freely that they knew themselves unworthy to fill his place. I remember Mr R., his immediate successor, standing in our dining-room (it was his first visit as our pastor) and avowing, with dramatic earnestness, that the latchet of Mr H.'s shoes he was not worthy to unloose. He became a very dear friend, however, Mr R. He was a jolly, hearty, healthy fellow, splendid to play with, with no sadness and no conspicuous saintliness about him.

We locked the door of the little haunted place, and walked back over the now dewy gra.s.s to the house, to deliver the key and say good-bye to our entertainers. Mr B. was ready for us, and drove us home through the lovely woods of W----, which owed some of their loveliness to the old man in his grave behind us, and along new ways that yet were as old and familiar and thick with ghosts as the roads we had come by in the afternoon. The whole dear land was a dream of peace in the long July twilight.

CHAPTER X

OUTDOOR LIFE

It was not a house or church, or wood or field, here or there, that swarmed with reminiscences of my life half-a-century ago; every bit of Norfolk soil that I pa.s.sed over or looked upon was thick with history of the old times. I had been so sure that the March of Progress, which in the same period had made a highly modern nation out of nothing on the other side of the world, would have swept away the wild-blooming hedgerows, the divisions of the little fields, the rutty, gra.s.sy, tree-shaded lanes, the old fas.h.i.+ons, generally, of my native county; and I could hardly believe in the luck which had spared so much that the little taken was scarcely missed. Some thirty years ago an Australian friend of mine made a long-desired pilgrimage to the home and graves of the Brontes, and blessed his fate in having chanced upon the last day before the church at Haworth, as Charlotte and Emily had used it, was closed for restoration. I was just too late for Crosby Hall, and the house of the H. family near T---- was gone; otherwise I had no disappointments in my search for the ancient landmarks. But that England was so beautifully well kept (and perhaps it was so then, although I did not notice it), it was the same England that I had left, and no part so unchanged as the part of Norfolk I returned to, which I called my own.

Driving about with M., I lived my old outdoor life again, as if there had been no break in it.

That there was any outdoor life at all in those benighted times I have heard questioned and denied in various ways by our athletic offspring.

”Oh, what did people do before there were tennis and croquet and golf?”

Contemporary writers are fond of drawing comparisons--I have done it myself--between the lady of old, with her prunella shoes and her swoons and her genteel incapability, and the stalwart, active, efficient damsel who now fills her place; wholly, of course, to the advantage of the latter. But, looking back, and trying to be strictly fair all round, I am not sure that the women of the fifties were so much less sensible (according to their lesser lights) than their descendants of to-day. It must be remembered that they could not be more sensible than fas.h.i.+on permitted, and that we are just as craven slaves to that impersonal tyrant as they were. I am sure that if fas.h.i.+on were suddenly to forbid tennis and croquet and golf and the rest, those invigorating pursuits would be abandoned to-morrow. You will say that our enlightened views upon physical culture would remain, to operate in other directions; and one must admit that in the fifties physical culture was unknown. There was no sanitation, no philosophy of food, no anything. Yet folks lived, and to a good old age too. They had one thing that we have not--the tranquil mind--than which there is no better foundation on which to build bodily health. We do not want their tranquil mind--certainly not--but that is beside the question.

In the fifties, although golf and tennis were not games for the mult.i.tude, bowls and cricket were as dear to the bewhiskered public as now to the clean-shaven or moustached; and women had their lawn diversions for the hours they considered enough to give to them, the balance of their active exercise being put into housework and ”duties”

generally. There was a primitive sort of lacrosse that we were addicted to, and archery, which was a graceful and quite scientific game. We had a small armoury of bows and arrows, bought cheap at the sale of the furniture of a neighbouring great house, and gave social entertainments on the strength of it while we lived at D----. Women with good figures showed to great advantage before the target, and eye and hand had to be as well trained for the bull's-eye as for the hoop or hole. It is true that archery was for the privileged well-to-do; an archery meeting usually had the background of a green and well-kept park. This rather disqualifies it for the purposes of comparison with our modern outdoor games. But those who did not have it did not miss it. There were nutting and blackberrying and mushrooming and May-daying--plenty of simple merrymakings--within reach of all.

On May mornings--oh, I wish I could have had an English May once more!--we were up with the birds and out in the fields to hunt for the first hawthorn bloom. It was one of the settled customs of the family, if not of the community. Often the morning was terribly cold, mostly the gra.s.s was reeking wet, but still the expedition was looked forward to with joy and carried through in the highest spirits. Blackthorn it was, if we found it at all, but it was not our fault if we did not return with some trophy of green bud or white flower to lay upon the breakfast-table. Later in the morning the village girls came round with their May garlands. A structure of crossed hoops of wood thickly wreathed with evergreens and artificial flowers, with a doll in the middle and any procurable odds and ends of ribbon, tinsel, or other finery, hung about it, fairly describes the sort of thing. Two girls carried it between them on a pole, and it was covered from view under a cloth until presented at your house door; the cloth was then whipped off, you gazed admiringly and, if generously disposed, or there were not too many of them, dropped a copper into an expectant hand or bag.

At any rate it was quite understood to be the right thing to take the air. We children were sent out in all weathers for our daily walk. I vividly remember crying with the cold, again and again, as I trudged along the snowy roads and through the bitter winds of those hard winters that used to be. Yet it was a wholesome practice, and we were wisely safeguarded against its risks, except in the matter of headgear, the close fit of which made our ears tender so that we suffered horribly from ear-ache, a malady unknown to the open-hatted head. On how many a night we wailed in sleep, or sobbed in our mother's arms by the fireside, with a roasted onion and a hot flannel pressed to the pain which they could not alleviate; and n.o.body knew the reason why.

When we went out in snow-time we wore snow-boots. They were woolly and waterproof, very thick, and were laced or b.u.t.toned over our other boots.

For wet weather we had clogs--wooden soles with leather toe-caps and ankle-straps; the soles were cut with supports like the arched piers of a bridge, that lifted them an inch or two from the ground. Our elders, and especially the working women, used pattens--wooden soles again, but raised upon an iron frame and ring, and with one fixed strap which took the foot at the instep when it was thrust through. One could not imagine the rural housewife and her maids flus.h.i.+ng their brick floors and wading through the ”muck” of their farmyards without their pattens on, nor imagine another contrivance that would have answered the purpose better.

Cheap, durable, put on and off in a moment, and needing no attention, they were most convenient to the wearers, and their effectiveness in keeping the feet dry and petticoats undrabbled must have made for health and cleanliness. Yet I suppose there are no clogs and pattens nowadays--I saw none; and, if so, it seems rather a pity. Things that have been improved upon ought to go, but why abandon those that still remain desirable? What is there to take the place of clogs and pattens in usefulness to the cla.s.s which once wore them? Not goloshes, surely.

They were not the only sensible footgear of these days either. When the eldest aunt visited us she used to bring our supply of nursery shoes, in which five children scampering about the floors made less noise than one does now. Those shoes were woven of narrow strips of cloth in a flat basket pattern, sole and upper in one, like deerskin moccasins, and as soft; some old man in her village made them to the eldest aunt's order.

But it may be that he was the sole manufacturer, whose art died with him, for I never saw their like elsewhere.

We drove as well as walked abroad. Ladies with carriages used them regularly of an afternoon, having paced their garden terraces--skirts held well above the hems of their snowy petticoats--earlier in the day.

Mother and I had many outings together in the gig; either to L----, to do shopping, or to her father's house at twice the distance away. And she did not attempt to drive with one hand and hold up an umbrella with the other; indeed, she could not have done it, for the ”gig-umbrella”--green cotton with a bulbous yellow handle--took a man's arm to support it. When it rained she drew a mackintosh hood from the box that was the gig seat and tied it over her bonnet, shutting everything in with a drawing-string round the face; there was also a curtain to it for the protection of neck and shoulders. Now, was not that a sensible idea? But we never wear on wet journeys a mackintosh hood or something better than a mackintosh hood, even in the dark when there is n.o.body to see us.

For driving in the sun she had another device. That father called it her ”ugly” indicates that it was for comfort rather than adornment; yet I do not see why it particularly deserved that name, comparing it with the many things we wore--and wear--that cannot be termed beautiful. A length of soft silk, blue, green or brown, equal to the circ.u.mference of the bonnet-brim, was run through with three or four flexible ribs, cane or whalebone or steel springs. The ends of silk and ribs were drawn together and strings sewn to them; and when the article was put on it made a sun-s.h.i.+eld for the eyes like a window-awning. I had a little one too. It clasped my little bonnet with a spring; and side by side we drove through the summer glare, sitting at ease with hands free, under a shelter better than that of the mushroom hat of a few years later. If, as I hold, the first principle of beauty is suitability, the ”ugly” was not ugly, and it deserved to live. How much it might have added to the pleasure of my long Bush journeys, and detracted from the fatigue!

The memory of those drives with my mother is amongst the sweetest of my youth. I was a very little child then, yet we were perfect companions.

All the way there and back we talked and talked, and never bored each other. I never knew her to ”shut me up” or put me off with evasive or impatient answers. Once when she was ill and we were all bothering her at once, she exclaimed, ”Oh, who would be a mother!” The words not only cut me to the heart as I heard them, but I never forgot they had been spoken; nor did she, and I do not think she forgave herself for them. It was the only instance I remember of her complaining under her burdens, which were so heavy for her strength, and especially of the cares of motherhood. Even the youngest aunt used to liken her to the fabled pelican that fed its young with its own blood. She had no life that was not lived for others, and first of all for us.