ao Roundal suf to ie i Je .University of Virginia Library DA630 .B73 MANa aay t Sa Pres er reer —< ae RN, . = ern a Sea tae rs : e i ie Go fe 3 é A i ey fee A > aoe woe Pog Tao. 0 LIBRARY OF UNIVERSITY OF Gep Aim | NG a Mi NM DHEA D § rm od / ‘\ 4 hm) kL A. if Y . ¥. \ ma -\ Fmt ‘ L& GIFT OF f Th g VPLS SSeS Tees f fe \ is —~, \ = - Tio . f or (| . j i [ H 1A | i wd 4 i erway ~~ a e u ! —— a ~», & y < * Sey. ™ meee a Lig eS, ——_- a - — ey iss Ce Per Se ee re as ed tT ie a al a VIRGINIA | ; | ~ > Tele De nelten WC Qa) ol : . on 2 a — 2 t a iy 2 / J & . aD “a { ~. oe] ~ Pe ’ Dp f # as ‘ ris ry Myo Ya Rrnorii ¥ LtPt a os FILE I PT) PET PEE — tke a ag? yee} dt ae tee . ter AS eee ee eR x . - aaa Epa ee tal os at se ie Gee Lee Neca ela ss Pinte Sere MIEGNE FLORY. JS irae te WE as hai SS a mG ea Re SeeRoundabout to CanterburyBY CHARLES S. BROOKS Essays, published by the Yale University Press: JOURNEYS TO BAGDAD, I9Q15 THERE’S PippINS AND CHEESE TO COME, I917 CHIMNEY-PoTt PAPERS, I919 Hints To PILGRIMS, 1921 A novel, published by the Century Company: Luca SARTO, 10920 Books, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company: FRIGHTFUL PLAys! 1922 A TureapD OF ENGLISH ROAD, 1924 Luca Sarto, A PLAY, 1924 Likr SuMMER’S CLOUD, 1925 RouNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY, 1926— = _ oo * ini!) ae ee | ie = : HT Ue S- a ee os sobeee i] ete = Vd AN) — \ \\} 2) |) tk . a } yal - ' > A ‘ i j AS i th ibe * y i} ae i | nA Fe . . fi ahs i wo GTi iF R im LA rh un | are MR a Py Ms A r CUT ip a * ge eS = ne = Fn . iff 7 rT / ——— = _. b- - ry j = ~ o ‘ae = a Pe ~~ nal —— nT} y _— i, = af 5 6 c a / A — ay // \ " ‘ = This { | j y ' WU {|} | \ i ; u fell | A Led . | mS IN . . told one another of our national defects and perversitiesRoundabout to Canterbury BY Charles S. Brooks WITH PICTURES BY Julia McCune Flory New York Harcourt, Brace and CompanyCOPYRIGHT, 1926, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC, Printed in the U. 8S. A.I dedicate this book to William Saal and James C. Brooks, Jr. with apologies for the liberties that I have taken.ACKNOWLEDGMENT Acknowledgment is made to the editors of The Yale Review, The Forum, and The Cleve- land Topics for their permission to reprint chapters to which they first extended shelter.CHAPTER I. Il. ITT. IV. Vie VI. VIL. VIII. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XeVe: XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. XX. XXI. XXIT. XXIII. CONTENTS We Start on A Bus Top HosotoHo! HErrana! THe Swarm OF Memory . Tue Man Wiru a Fty In His Beer . MorNING AT PENHURST To tHE Roap AGAIN . A Dirty Inn to END THE Day. Intropucinc A Burinp MAN AND THE LADY POMFRET-DAWKEN. Tue CruisE oF THE Forcet-ME-Not . PAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A HuRRIED READER CONTAINING A Burst OF SONG Ten Tuousanp Lrecs ABOVE THE SEA. A Txuousanp Cows MepitatE REVENGE Over Bracuy Heap to ALFRISTON. Anp THEN FOR THE Nicut To LEWEs. PAGE 15 Q4 40 At 57 68 85 99 106 124 135 150 161 170 Tus ProputeM Tuat ARISES FROM THE SLEEPI- NESS OF READERS. THREE TRAVELERS Escape MuRpDER! A Frnat Errort To CoMPLETE THE CHAPTER. Sarm AGAIN IN TRIVIAL MATTER. A Snort CHAPTER ON BOREDOM. In Wuaicu tan Devi 1s INTRODUCED . In Wuicu A Lapy TApsterR SAVES ouR LIVES For SENTIMENTAL READERS . 11 176 180 184 190 201 205 214 294,12 CHAPTER XXIV. XXV. XXVI. XXVITI. XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. XXXI. XXXII. XXXII. XXXIV. XXXYV. CONTENTS We JourNEY TO Goopwoop FOR THE RACES Tue Goopwoop RaAcEs. In Wuicu We SEE A GENTLEMAN BEREFT OF REASON . NortH TO HASLEMERE. A DIvIDEND FOR GUINNESS A SHuort Day Enpina Wit A CHORUS A Lona Day rn Wartcnu I Cums Keita HILn A DiacrEssION oN “THE Pickwick PAPERS” To KNOLE tere We Draw Near THE END THREE TRAMPS IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND. A CANTERBURY PILGRIM PAGE 237 244 308 314 324 329 338Roundabout to Canterburyny 0 : . or -_ 4 ~ a N o . Seale bed yy ne a’, . - oN 4 > D if ry 7 . 7 A 4 ’ - ‘ =. Son 2 « ‘ny UT +d 1 CHAPTER I WE START ON A BUS TOP T was hard on noon of the sixteenth day of July, that two men and a boy might have been seen walking rapidly up the Strand from Charing Cross to Waterloo; for I choose to start in the solitary horseman style, as was once the fashion in every tale of high adventure. Several thousand pedestrians might have observed, if they had been so curious, that each of these three swung a rucksack at his side; that each wore, as his whim dictated, an outing suit; that each head, against the law of London and the Magna Carta, was sur- mounted by a cap. If any of these thousand pedes- trians, not to mention their lazy brethren who jolted on bus tops to the city—if anyone, I repeat, had been so rude as to have peeped within the strange bulging 1516 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY of the rucksacks he would have discovered, not as you might think a kit of burglar’s tools, but in each a change of linen, the morning tackle of ablution. a quantity of ordnance maps, a book for easy reading on the elbow, a bottle of powder for the boots. And in one bag he would have found an itinerant drug store, of which more presently when these three have need of ointment. Evidently they went their way unnoticed, for vainly I have searched the contemporary press in its columns of scandal, accident and murder. And I fancy that even on that memorable day when Drake sailed from hereabouts to explore the circuit of the world there were folk as sullen on the streets, so absorbed in the penny profit of their shops that they did not know what mighty business was afoot. Were the wharves of Palos crowded? Did a shout fetch the sluggards to a window when Cabot sailed? So in equal neglect our travelers tread the Strand, which is again adventure’s port. Are they off to the icy regions of the pole? Let’s ease the strain upon the curious readers who have spent their money to our advantage, although it is but a paltry ten per cent because of the greed of publishers. Even to those mercenary folk who borrow books and keep us hungry in an attic we shall show our mercy. How do they think that authors live when books are so cheaply passed about? They tell us that they have plucked us from a public library; they lend us round among their friends, and expect our thanks. The royalty from a purchased copy leaves nothing from a sandwich, andWE START ON A BUS TOP 17 shall we dine on less? These three travelers, then, seek a bus at Waterloo to bear them southward out of Lon- don, and where the bus shall climb a hill beyond the last uproar of the city they will descend, bind the ruck- sacks on their backs and tread roundabout the roads of Surrey, Kent and Sussex until at last they come to Canterbury. To Drake the cannibals and the an- thropopagi! These three are determined on adventure among the bacon-eaters of southern England. The first is known as Bill. On this morning of July sixteenth he wears gray flannel trousers with such other suitable garments inside and above as keep him modest. His boots, although they make a fine appearance in sedentary hours, are villains that scheme to overthrow him. Bill is a musician, with a studio, a grand piano and fair pupils who reach high C without a strain upon the buttons. In his lazy days he has a thirst for Guin- ness stout and at Haslemere he will recount the flowing gallons of his student days, with results. Nothing more inspiringly pathetic exists than his pilgrimage once to the brewery at Dublin to behold what he con- siders to be a second and more potent Font of Youth. You can see him standing hat in hand on a jaunting car, as one of different devotion might pass the shrine of Francis. He is the soul of generosity. Fifty idlers on the way will drink at his expense, a hundred children reach within his pocket for a lollipop. Weary, he will cry out “Oh, my soul!” and sit down abruptly by the road, once upon a thistle. Always he is of pleasant temper and ready to see the humor of a mishap. He is quick of eye toward the detail of English life—not the_ eee 18 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY obvious alone, but the trifles that mark a foreign people, the commonplace that escapes so many travelers. If any shrewdness shows upon these pages, it is likely that the hint was his. Each night and morning he putters with lotions from his wandering drug store. gy LMG BAD AL ALLA a a ee a He is polite to dogs The second of these men is a youth who is slipping rapidly through his forties and his last remaining hair. His is a head that needs a brush but not a comb, for the central tangle is cleared away. He wears a golf suit but it is merely pretense, for he hooks and slices. He carries two nonleakable fountain pens that leak within his pocket. Or is this their protest that he holdsWE START ON A BUS TOP 19 them idle, for they are the symbol of his profession? He is polite to dogs and to all strange cattle that seem of a dirty disposition and have hooks in front. The third of our travelers is a young man of seventeen years who at home squeaks on a violin but has a soul to be a Kreisler. His zeal is large for music, and from morn to eve he will discourse of Galli-Curci. His prized possessions are signed photographs of the opera singers, for he writes them pleading notes with a stamp inclosed. But his baser self is always hungry and he has room aboard—a hollow leg, perhaps—for six square meals a day. In any lapse of the G6tterdammerung he will inquire whether it is time to eat. There is to be a shock for the waitresses of southern England and many a pretty face will turn pale as it trots for extra beef and mutton. Bill orders a dessert but shoves it on to him. This young man’s name is Jimmie, but he is known at school as Beezer or sometimes vulgarly as simpleberry. Bill and Beezer will talk for hours of music—high stuff like the Ring and Parsifal—until the young man with the nonleakable fountain pens is forced to stuff his ears. - And now these three are seated on a bus top that owes its strength to Bovril. Need I explain? Every signboard sings its praise—a spoonful night and morn- ing for the shaking legs of convalescence. In which hymn of praise the London busses join, at usual rates. Behind our travelers stands the Adelphi Terrace where Garrick died and Bernard Shaw lives. Up- stream rise the towers of Parliament with Big Ben booming out the noon. Beneath them is the temporary20 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY structure that serves during the repairs of Waterloo, and lower still the Thames runs to the ocean with the tide in quest of its own adventure. Bovril wheezes into motion stiff of joint, as if today, alas, it had neg- lected its steaming spoon. There is a burst of song from the forward seats and the trip has started. an i! — a. =S=—-" Bovril wheezes into motion stiff of joint “Hojotoho! Heiaha!’? This from Bill with waving arms, in the manner of a Valkyr mounting to Valhalla. “Hojotoho! Heiaha!’® An echo from Beezer. “Don’t be an ass!” My own contribution. If now you own a map of the general bus lines of London and will trace with your finger the route that Bovril took you will see that Bill, Beezer and myself sped out past the Elephant and Castle (a tavern, dear innocent) and along the New Kent Road and otherWE START ON A BUS TOP 21 streets to Deptford—a deep ford once across the Ravensbourne, a stream which joined the Thames. It was in a Deptford tavern that Christopher Marlowe was killed in a brawl, and we saw many taverns that looked as if they competed for the honor and still lived in the high tradition. There were masts of shipping, too, at the foot of every street and warehouses to store the product of the seven seas. This is the center for a thousand routes of freight that spin the web of empire. Here we steered south through crowded ways to Lewisham and were let down, as the English say, at the end of the bus line. We had traversed the high streets of many towns all within the city. ‘““How did it happen” asked Bill, “that so many towns came together?” “T think” said Beezer, ““that they were lonesome in the country and crowded in for movies and excitement.”’ “Excellent, Rollo,’ I replied. ‘““And now will you tell me how anyone can be sure of knowing his own house on such monotonous streets where all doorways seem the same. You'd think that a man would have to try his key a dozen times before he found a lock to fit. A wrong nightcap might greet him with a candle on the stairs.” “Tt is the rubber plant” said Bill, “that restores a husband to his wife—its exact position against the cur- tain. The natives become very clever at recognizing their own rubber plants. It’s a wise father who knows his own—” “Tt is,” I interrupted. ‘The monstrous progeny of rubber plants must always be a mystery.”’ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY “I myself” said Bull, “‘ prefer the aspidistra.”’ ‘‘And what is that?”’ I asked. ‘““Anon!” he answered. ‘“‘Of it we shall see much upon our travels.” “IT have perused many books of England,” I replied. ““Of thatched roofs and half-timbering I know much. I am steeped in perpendicular and lancet, but no author has informed me of the aspidistra.”’ “That is the fault of travelers,” said Bill. “They will not demean themselves to vulgar things. ‘The habitat of the aspidistra is the front window of a boarding house; for, although it is found sometimes in the dwellings of the rich, it flourishes best on a shabby sill. Each year it puts forth a crop of leaves to be distinguished by a thinner coating of dust, and in the market it sells at a shilling for each of this fresher crop. Three clean leaves, three shillings! Am I clear?”’ “Preserve these facts, Rollo,’ I replied, “and as we go along name for practice the price of these plants that decorate the street. It’s the old problem of the herrings. If six and a half cost—you know—what will?—you get me.” “The three-legged easel and the crayon portrait of erandfather,” continued Bill, “also found in English boarding houses, are other matters to which I have given study.” ‘Shall we meet them on our travels?”’ I asked. “T know” Bill persisted, “many varieties of God Bless Our Home—sometimes in water colors, some- times designed in dyed chicken feathers, but always found on parlor walls.”’WE START ON A BUS TOP 23 “One lesson is enough,” I answered. “We must not burden Beezer.”’ As we were still in the uproar of London we mounted another bus, also known as Bovril, also without its steaming spoon, which presently rattled off through Bromley. And Keston was next and other villages, until in good time somewhat of the noise fell off behind and fields opened up between the houses. Once, also, we caught a glimpse of a smiling valley with sheep upon the hills and in the misty distance the roof of the Crystal Palace with the smudge of London low down against the north.But these, also, had been chained CHALLE. LL HOJOTOHO! HEIAHA! T was after two o’clock when we climbed to the top of Westerham Hill, and here our bus sat back upon its haunches with a determination that showed even to the stupid that under no persuasion would it go farther. “At last!” cried Bill. ‘‘Here is where the roads of England start. World, Iam coming!” And he arose, waved his arms and skipped lightly down the steps. But there was a tavern handy and in order that the 24HOJOTOHO! HEIAHA! 25 trip might begin with proper ceremony we ordered bitter beer and pledged one another. An inch or so for Beezer, who would have preferred an ice cream soda. Then, strapping on our rucksacks, we journeyed off afoot. A sharp pitch leads downward from Westerham Hill and on its brow we discovered a public house which seemed to offer the promise of lunch. But an old gen- tleman who answered to our knock informed us that the cook had gone to town and that the fire was out. “How about a cold joint?” I asked. “'That’s the trouble,” the man replied. “There is a joint in the pantry to be sure, but the key is turned upon it.” ‘Bread and cheese,” persisted Bill. But these, also, had been chained. Behind the public house there was a curious mound which I thought might conceal a gun emplacement, but the old fellow could give us no information. Man and boy and all that sort of thing, but it had never occurred to him to inquire. At my question he repeated only that the cook had gone to town, and rheumy matter trickled from his eyes. He was bent upon his cane with clammy living and his wit was as sluggish as his legs. The ordnance map shows a rifle range below the hill, so it is likely that my guess was right. Perhaps in nineteen fourteen a gun had been put there to guard the London highway. The man with the watery eyes shut the door in hard finality and we turned away. Presently on the slope we crossed the Pilgrims’ Way26 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY which is here sunk to the semblance of a farmyard lane, a vagrant ribbon cut in the facing of the hills. But though it is a path which three fat cows might block from wall to wall and runs in the lazy curve of easiest level it is the most famous of all the roads of England. I hinted so much to Bill. ‘“Let’s lie down upon the grass,” he answered. “I listen better so.”’ Its present name arose in early modern times when a stream of pilgrims caught with holy zeal journeyed from the west to lay their worship at the shrine of Thomas Becket. Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in disagreement with his King whether the Church should play a second fiddle to the State, had been murdered December twenty-ninth, eleven hundred and seventy, on the steps of his altar in the twilight; and almost at once a Great Pilgrimage set out for Canter- bury to protest against the sacrilege. For fifty years the anniversary of his death was precisely kept, and men toiled eastward on slippery winter roads. Then the seventh of July, the day of St. Thomas’s translation, was marked for a second feast; for the hardships of winter were too sharp and it was thought expedient to add a summer month for pilgrimage. And the habit of pious journey grew until each season of the year possessed its special festival to crowd the road. It was in spring that Chaucer launched his pilgrims from the Tabard Inn in Southwark down the valley of the Thames, and April must have continued a favorite month when all the countryside was green.HOJOTOHO! HEIAHA! 27 Men toiled eastward on slippery winter roads ‘Probably restlessness,” said Bill. “I feel that way myself in spring.” “Yet these,” I continued, “‘were but upstart years that hardly fringe upon the road’s antiquity.” *“May’s the hardest month,” persisted Bill, “the first warm days. Young ladies reaching for high notes.28 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY Morning ‘s at seven! That kind of thing. I wish there were shrines in the middle west.” “Lie down,’ I said. “‘I am instructing Beezer.”’ Centuries before the death of Becket this was the general artery from the plains of Hampshire to Canter- bury and the narrow seas where commerce and civiliza- tion crossed from France. It lay ready, earlier still, for the armies of the Normans, for the Danish and Saxon conquests; and Aylesford was fought upon its edge. Such Vikings as sailed south and beached their ships in the shallow rivers of the Channel used it for their invasion. ‘The Romans found it ready-made and when their legions pounded up its chalky dust they were travelers on the path of their predecessors. More remotely the Phoenicians discovered the tin mines of Cornwall and this was their road of commerce on which mules bore treasure to the east. When Stonehenge was first built this was the path to its windy plain. Here the ancient Britons went back and forth before the use of tin or iron was known. Shortly on our travels, when our course once more touches on the Way, we shall see a pit where stone knives and hatchets have been lately dug. Science, in default of date, has placed these in the neolithic age; but the large word only conceals its ignorance in which of many thousand years these implements were chipped and sharpened. These things grow dizzy to a layman, for they run countless generations before Noah’s paltry flood. ‘You are sure of all this?” asked Bill. “Tam,” I replied. “I cribbed it from a book.” **I guessed as much,” retorted Bill.HOJOTOHO! HEIAHA! 29 ‘““And now’ I continued, “‘what are the conditions that determine the placing of an ancient road?”’ “That’s what I want to hear,” said Bill, rolling to his other elbow, ““but make it short. If I shut my eyes, don’t think that I’m asleep.” Hilaire Belloc has written a book on this same Way along the northern downs and he has many facts and theories. A mountain range, he says, does not so block communication as does marshy land; and therefore an early road will keep always to the hills. As storms are sharpest at the top, it will stay halfway to the summit, and it will choose a southern slope because its surface dries most quickly in the spring. Not only are marshes usual in valleys, but in thick woods a path is lost and a traveler finds it hard to keep direction. In the valleys, too, the rivers are difficult to cross but they can be managed on their upper course. So generally an early road will seek a range of hills. If a watershed must be crossed, a route will be found along an upward stream and then, with a climb at the top, a downward stream be sought. Moreover a range of hills often shows at the morning start a destination for the night and, even if the intermediate path be blurred, the range is guide. And so from Canterbury to Winchester the old road follows the southern slope of the northern downs above the wooded confusion of the Weald, and all through the centuries before man was civilized this was the line of progress from east to west. But now it has sunk to farmyard use and cattle nibble at the grass. ‘It’s about time for food,”’ said Beezer. “Quite right, Rollo,’ I replied. ‘“‘Though a man30 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY should not live to eat, it is proper that he eat to live. Cherish these lessons as we go along.” It was hereabouts that we had our first view of Westerham. A valley lies between parallel hills north and south. I cannot think that they overtop the low- land by many hundred feet, but beauty carries no yard- stick for its measure. The sides are of gradual slope, and bear crops and pasture to the summit. ‘““At school,” said Beezer, ““one of the boys wrote ‘It was a broad valley and hills slopped up both sides.’”’ “T’ll warrant he got a low mark for that.” “That wasn’t so bad as what another fellow wrote ‘She was the boniest lass in all Scotland.’”’ And so we beguiled the way. In this valley yellow grain is varied by the deep green of woodland. Here and there a tower shows where a village is buried in the trees and the roads run up and down with a friendly leisure as if clocks were things un- known. It is a land of sunlight and shadow, and even the rudest winds of winter must visit here with gentler purpose. For a tempest plays its pranks upon the hills, but comes at a sober gait to the shelter of the lowland. And just as the Pilgrims’ Way marks through all antiquity the course to the southeast English Channel, so in our later times the present motor highway lies parallel across the valley and guides the rushing traffic to Canterbury and Dover. I wonder whether some- times in the dusk of twilight when the night brings on its silence—I wonder whether these two roads do not call to one another across the fields and boast of their rival pageantry.HOJOTOHO! HEIAHA! 31 On the valley’s farther slope stood Westerham with a church tower to mark it against the hill, and this was our objective for the night. ‘‘ How far have we gone?” asked Beezer. ‘Three miles at most,” I answered. “‘Tt’s four o’clock,” he persisted, “‘and I am precious hungry.” SO we inquired at the Post Office and were directed to a turning and the King’s Arms Hotel, which stands in the village square. We fumbled through hallways until we found the landlady in a snuggery where she kept her ledger. Off we threw our rucksacks. Any cook grows sober at the hint of food between meals, but it was merely a shadow on the good nature of the cook at Westerham, and presently she laid out for us great slabs of beef and bread. We drank her health from pewter mugs of bitter beer and closed hungrily upon the food. Then while Bill and Beezer slept I went out to see the town. There is a triangular open space in front of the King’s Arms that serves as a village square. Round- about are shops. A farther corner of this opens upon the churchyard but I followed the highroad to the right which presently drops sharply off the upper level past a decayed range of ancient buildings of sagging roof and musty front. The tiles put forth a crop of moss and waving grasses, as if sap ran up the walls thinking it to be a vegetable of a larger sort that was now in blossom. I recall a nursery tale of a woman whose roof was thus a pasturage of hay, and the calamities that befell her32 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY when she boosted her cow up the ladder for her supper. It is a pitiful story for, when the cow was lodged on top, the old lady was concerned lest the creature fall off. So she tied a string to a hoof and lowered it down the chimney. This string presently she wrapped around her thumb as she sat knitting in her kitchen. As long as there was no jerk she knew that her pet was safe. And the cow did fall off, and she was yanked up the chimney by her thumb where she was smothered in the soot. I peeped in windows as I went down the hill, into tiny rooms of low ceiling and homely life, where old women already puttered around for supper and sleepy cats yawned on the sill. At the foot of the incline where the road splits north and south there stands a house more ambitious than its neighbors. It sets back within a garden, and a bronze tablet on the wall against the street announces that this was the home of General James Wolfe from seven- teen twenty-seven until thirty-eight. A greengrocer keeps a shop on the opposite corner, where a customer was trying her thumb on the tomatoes. So I stepped across for information. When I put my question all commercial operations were suspended and the shop- keeper told me that Wolfe had been born here. But at this the lady with the thumb corrected her. It seems that on a certain afternoon of January, seventeen hundred and twenty-seven, Mrs. Wolfe went up the hill to the vicarage for a dish of tea with the Vicar’s wife; and, this pleasant ceremony concluded, promptly—evidently without warning—to everyone'sHOJOTOHO! HEIAHA! 33 consternation—in the midst of uproar—gave birth toason. I can fancy the hot excitement. The pan of charcoal fetched to warm the sheets! The teacups overturned and spread about with half-bit muffins! The village doctor running with his bag! The Vicar’s neglected sermon! The village doctor running with his bag! The spread of news from house to house! Even the echo of this gossip, now that two hundred years have passed, obliterated all thought of tomatoes. “Shall I put them in your basket?” persisted the saleswoman. “A shilling to the measure!”Sh ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY “What do you get for beans today?” replied her customer, but her tone was lukewarm for she dwelt in older matters. The house where Wolfe would have been born under better management is open to the public but, although the shopkeeper had lived here all her life and had often brought vegetables to the kitchen door, she had never been inside. I looked curiously at the vicarage as I came up the hill. It stands snugly inside a garden, dozing forgetful of the past. But I fancy that somewhere on a handy shelf are the identical cups and saucers, still used on a sunny afternoon, that served Mrs. Wolfe and the Vicar’s wife. The stuffy building of the greengrocer, shared with a dealer of antiques, is named Quebec Cottage. And there is a statue of Wolfe on the village green, with this inscription: With humble grief inscribe one artless stone And from thy matchless honors date our own. Six young children were dancing a kind of quadrille beside the statue to the accompaniment of their own singing—a merry little tune quite broken by their panting breath. I listened but I could not catch the words. It was a pretty ceremony and it added a touch of beauty to the green. I sat quietly on a bench with back half turned lest I disturb their dance; and, if the soul of Wolfe were lingering hereabouts, he must have enjoyed it as myself that children should keep himHOJOTOHO! HEIAHA! 35 company. I would expect no less from a man who read the Elegy on the eve of battle. I had often thought that the one thing needed in these peaceful villages of England was the contrasting merriment of children; that these ancient walls were a proper setting for lives that hardly looked beyond their days of April. And here, where our travels had hardly started, we had come on such a village, and the songs of children already were binding close the older centuries with jest and laughter. The world in its essence changes slowly despite the politicians, and doubtless from many of the village windows wrinkled faces looked out upon the fun and remembered how they, too, had played on summer afternoons long past. And the churchyard stands hard by where other danc- ing grandsires sleep. I rested in the garden of the King’s Arms. There was an easy-chair beside the tennis court and in this I sat to jot down my notes of travel. But my pen was dull with sleepy thought; so I scratched verses, for the search for rhyme and the check of measure on the fingers hold one awake. In Surrey I sit in a garden of flowers Where a hedge and the road are near, And I catch the step from ages past Of men who traveled here. Before the days of tool and fire, In the years of fang and claw, Man fashioned a path from tree to cave, For this was his nature’s law.— ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY The animals’ tread was a hint at the first From their lair to the pool they ran—; But he broadened the trail and tramped it down, And this was his start as man. A path is chief of his brain’s device. It surpasses the tool or fire, Or the sail or wheel, or the arch or plow; For the path was the future’s sire. A village is only the crossing of roads. A town ends a path to the sea. And where broad ways meet and rest at night A city shall come to be. In Surrey I sit in a garden of flowers Where the hedge and the road are near, And I catch the step from ages past Of men who traveled here. Bill, Beezer and I had an excellent dinner with a friendly cat rubbing against our legs, and then we set out to see the church. A socialist was haranguing the village on the green, blaming the government for its foreign treaties and the general unemployment. I could not see that anyone was much excited. A hundred persons stood about in attitudes expressing various degrees of rheumatism and loss of teeth, with children playing tag upon the out- skirts. The orator looked upon the empty faces and commended the crowd for its intelligence. He said he was a man of peace and must not inflame them. ButHOJOTOHO! HEIAHA! 37 they would record their protest, he knew, in the next election, and return labor into power. There was a slight wagging of brier pipes, but it may have been palsy. And now having worked himself to a fine excitement without any visible effect upon his stolid audience, presently he sat down. We observed an old —_ rue £40 on I wonder why old folk persist so long on the uneasy dosing of a pill dame with lace cap upon her head who looked from the window of her corset and stocking shop, and she at least had been a Tory and Bourbon for eighty years. Westerham Church stands in its graveyard at the edge of the green and gazes from its quiet perch across the valley. It offers so peaceful a retreat from life thatcece ele ana ee el een eee ete eee a a. 38 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY I wonder why old folk persist so long on the uneasy dosing of a pill. It is so handy to the village, so shad- owed and so homelike, that one might forgive a rheu- matic soul from leaning on its gate and contemplating pleasantly the snug living that it offers. If a bare bodkin ever finds excuse it is in one of these English villages where immortality is sure. This gate, too, that opens to the graveyard, is the sport of children, for it sags from their accustomed use. The church seems largely of fourteenth century construction, with a fine carved portal and a sundial in the lawn to mark eternity for those who wait. We walked around its western end among the graves and looked out across a wall upon a rolling country where grain and pasture covered the valley with a house- wife’s comforter against the coming of the winter. The evening was well advanced and a twilight peace lay on the hills. Below us on the slope was here and there a house with its supper smoke still curling up- ward. Children were at their games in a nearby field, with their hats strung upon a picket fence like Jesuit heads once on the pikes of London Bridge. A little girl, tied in a burlap bag, races as best she may and tumbles shouting in the grass. Another skips a rope and is hard at work on pepper. Another passes with a great bottle of water from a spring, with her thumb inside. There is the barking of a dog, the hammering of a belated carpenter. A motor speeds past on a distant highway. The smoke of a locomotive races up to London, too late already for the excitement of Leicester Square and its solicitation of painted faces. AndHOJOTOHO! HEIAHA! 39 across all the valley a blue haze settles down, as if nature cooked hereabouts its tardy supper. “Do you suppose there is a movie in the town?” asked Beezer. ‘“No, thank God!” said Bill. “'There’s one next week,” persisted Beezer, “I saw the notice.”’ “Tt’s God’s mercy.” said Bill. “Next week!” The bed in my room at the King’s Arms was of a tumbled sort, all up and down in ridges, as if it were apprentice to the hills. But I fell asleep to the sound of footsteps on the village pavement.—S/@Lin OTLUNE FLORAY, —— = 4 Pit it NY | | | NY ~ N We SOY io This high adventure of a tumbled brain CHAPTER II THE SWARM OF MEMORY T the front of Don Quixote’s joyous book of travel there is a picture wherein the Don is surrounded by the swarming creatures of his fancy, as he sits in his study by the fire, staring on disordered space to summon back the chaos of the past. There is more than a touch of lunacy in this hot whirl of fantastic thought that flies about his head— these windmills, giants and ladies in distress, this high adventure of a tumbled brain—, and, except for his gentleness of nature, I suspect that a heavy key would properly be turned upon him. Here he sits in medita- tion, while his crazy reason resounds with the tread of dreams that wander in a world of folly, the pageant of romance, the patter of scampering mischief, and below it all the sober march of melancholy thought. 40THE SWARM OF MEMORY 41 And mine, like his, is a harmless lunacy that goes unwatched; for here I sit at my desk in contemplation with journey done and, gazing at the twilight of the year, I review its mild adventure—its jest and mishap, its merry hour, the sun and shadow of its prime. In this season our greener days are past; and nature, stoking now her furnace against the winter, in one universal conflagration of the hills tries vainly to lift the autumn chill. As nights grow cold our memory of June quickens into life, and the frosty storage of October preserves in recollection the moons of August and the verdure of the hills. A wind is loose tonight and in the rustling of leaves across the lawn I hear the shouts of summer, its chance and venture, its song and frolic of the night, and those sober voices, also, which lay a shadow in the pattern. My book has started. J am home again, weaving a narrative of such matters as I recall. A beginning is the hardest, for a first chapter, like Bovril, wheezes into motion. Through August we walked in southern England on a long path of many towns and it is my desire to capture these creatures that fly about me, to sentence them within the prison of a book. Roundabout we went from London in a great loop which the map must show, and at the end we were pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Can words bring back the musty smell of inns, the village streets where children romp, the appetite and thirst that end a dusty day? Can they recall the con-42 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY tour of the hills, the wall of ancient battles, the spire that rises through the trees to lead us to the older centuries? Can the tinkle of a word recall the shallow murmur of sunny waters and build a pilgrims’ bridge? Or if a paragraph shall throw its net shall a cloud be ow = a ry _— a i nee ul Neth y Y oh , “ dy, Ths ee fg \ : ~ - f yp ~~ ay Ph Ny, = - 32% SS a Z 47 YY r? ” td HY Liha! rl Pramas - rt @e1ey 8; [inst 4 a rm} ra * WS it Ld = mee we Ni ‘ta. ** os H bbst.! Var NES fas f Sirs ans PY RAS —==, \\ BN} a > {A } he A ea a ae c h P Vest, —_— — > — _eirn iettUNk& FLO ————= If a paragraph shall throw its net shall a cloud be caught? caught? Roads wander in the twilight of the mind, with grazing cattle and meadows patched in many colors. From a hilltop of the brain there stretches out the se: where ships go back and forth on smoky errand. Soft on the carpet of the woods the fancy lies and hears the melody of wind whose slim fingers strum forever in the trees. Words must be brought from common use to rear the castles of the thought. They must fetch back the laugh that escaped from the window of a tavern. Words are a galleon whose hold is piled withTHE SWARM OF MEMORY 43 / treasure for such market as spends a proper coin of sympathy and understanding. Memory pours them from an inkpot and a jest is kept alive beyond its echo. Night leans its thin black face upon the window. I whistle to the creatures of my fancy. he 3 A fh fu nt 4 CTCUNE FLOR ———— Night leans its thin black face upon the windowCHAPTER IV THE MAN WITH A FLY IN HIS BEER E were on the road next morning shortly be- fore ten o’clock but were stopped presently by the engaging clutter in the antiquary's window just across from General Wolfe’s. The shop was locked but the owner had seen us and up he pat- tered for a sale. Bull has a collector’s taste for old glass, so he tapped the goblets for their sound. And now it seemed that one day several years ago a motor had halted at the antiquary’s door and a gentleman with bushy hair somewhat past middle life had entered with a tinkling of the doorbell. He bought several goblets like these that stood before us, sent them to his motor with evident satisfaction and drove away. Hardly had he turned the corner when a neighbor rushed in breathless to tell him that his customer had been Lloyd George. 44THE MAN WITH A FLY IN HIS BEER 45 “Lloyd George in this very shop, sir, standing just where you are, talking to me like an equal!”’ **Amazing!”’ said Bull. ‘**A dozen goblets! Twelve of them! Me tiein’ them up in the Daily Mail!” The antiquary had been a Tory, I suspect, until this encounter; but now at my challenge he confessed that his politics were shaken. In any discussion in the vil- lage pub doubtless he wavers to the Liberal camp. During his long narration he had hooked my button- hole, and he followed us to the sidewalk and up the street for added detail. I have myself met one or two golden persons, and I know how the old man cherished green outsiders to listen to his boast. If ever I meet Lloyd George I shall tell him that he holds safe the crossroad vote. At the antiquary’s we turned south on the highway up a long hill to Chart’s Edge. In Kentish dialect a chart is a rough common overgrown with gorse and broom and heather. ‘These commons are of a shaggier, less tamed beauty than private land. Where the growth can be digested sheep and cattle keep them nibbled close, and in their unfenced patches of brier and thistle with wayward paths upon the hills they convey a suggestion of wanton gypsy life. A caravan of these swarthy nomads had gone through Westerham as we sat at breakfast—a very circus of red shawls and covered wagons—and it 1s likely that last night they were camped here upon the chart where blackened embers still remained. I had asked the waitress their means of livelihood. They tell fortunes46 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY for a sixpence, they gain a sharp profit from the sale of a gaudy rag or shining bead; but chiefly such offers are but an excuse to linger in the chicken yard for petty theft. They seem to have abandoned the kidnaping of children for a ransom. Gypsies are frequent in the English countryside and one understands how they are a bogey to frighten children in their nursery tales. They are a strange exotic people—for the flight from Egypt seems eternal—and they weave a crimson thread across the pattern of these sober towns. French Street lies on a lane that circles through a wood, and in my ignorance which the guidebook will not dispel, I choose to think that here settled some Huguenot who had escaped from St. Bartholomew. It is but a cluster of houses that sprouted in its youth like mushrooms in the damp shadow of the mighty trees that hang upon the hill. Hereabouts, where our lane ended at a stable door, a tremendous dog was of a mind to eat me. He sniffed as at a platter to find the sweetest bite. I like a dog when his master is about to present me as a friend— a dog of kindly eye and wagging tail. I like him if he has the soft manners of a cat. If he possess false teeth which he guards from accident, then would I make that dog my pet. But this creature had a fixed idea against all argument that I had come to rob the stable. In vain I met him with my eye, as books advise in any conflict of the jungle. So, assuming a slinking innocent manner and sidling by with short steps to protect my heels, finally I escaped. Here we took to a path across Toy’s Hill, a woodlandTHE MAN WITH A FLY IN HIS BEER 47 climb of exquisite beauty. There is a bit of clearing at the top and, as we had walked several miles and Bill’s boots were full of feet, we threw down our ruck- sacks for a rest. A green valley of hedge and meadow lay below us, with the towers of many villages peeping up. White clouds drifted in a depth of blue like snow- clad mountains on a journey. Had an Alp broken from its moorings in the south? Had it packed its bag for the windy steerage of the sky to seek these fields of England to rear anew its fortune? And so we rested, with rucksacks for our pillows. Nor can I think of a finer interlude of travel than lying on one’s back upon a carpet of thick moss while drowsy melodies are sounding in the trees. It is a tune that stirred the ear of prophets when first the rolling carpet of the hills was laid. It is the song that came to David as he walked among his sheep. And poets have always listened to its voice to steal the cadence for their thought. In such circumstance, if ever, peace descends upon the heart and the roar of living sinks to the shallow murmur of a runnel on the stones. Bill’s boots were off. “I'll never move again,” he said. ‘“‘Under the wide and starry sky, dig the grave and let me lie.”’ ‘Later,’ I replied. “But tonight we must make Penshurst.” Bill groaned and drew on his boots. At the foot of the path we were back on the highroad and the next town was Four Elms. It was in the tap- room, where we ran dry of lubricant. that we met the man with the fly in his beer.48 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY These taps consist commonly of a private bar for gentlemen and a general pub for ordinary folk. ‘There is something rather still and haughty about the private bar, so we regularly took our ease within the pub. The beer is the same, sevenpence for persons of stiffer quality and sixpence in the pub. At best the beer is thin and is hardly stronger than ours that sticks within the law, but it is of riper taste as if it had aged longer in the wood. This beer is the usual jest of the vaudeville stage and is regarded as another calamity of high taxes and the war. A group of villagers had already assembled for their noonday drink. Bill, who is the leader in our hospital- ity, ordered mugs all round and we fell to talking. One of the farmers had recently been in East Anglia, which lies above us on the coast of England, and he was telling of its greater productivity than this region of his own. The talk shifted to the size of wagon that was best for a two-horse haul in stubble land. And then a fly fell in one old gentleman’s beer and had to be fetched out with his leathery thumb. A humorous look came in his shrewd eyes all meshed in wrinkles as he remarked that the fly was thirsty too and should have his share. It was but an extension of the dole. They were friendly fellows, Just as everybody was friendly whom we met on our walking trip. We found nothing but courtesy and a wish to please—easy natural manners and a deference that contrasts with the brusqueness of America. A shift of conversation to the present circumstance of England revealed a discourage-THE MAN WITH A FLY IN HIS BEER 49 ment of outlook that we found later to be usual through all the taproom acquaintance of our trip. Nor shoulda generalization made by travelers who sat in fifty sequent taverns be considered entirely superficial, when it is supported by all the contact of road and town. Here at least was opinion that came undoctored to a stranger. **How about Canada?” I asked. The man with the leather thumb shrugged his shoul- ders. “I am too old,” he said. “Sammy here is of a mind to go.” It appeared from fifty taverns that all the country- side regretted its inability through age or poverty or family tie, to get out to the colonies for a chance of betterment. We were asked many times the third- class fare to Montreal, and persons of this or that vocation inquired what chance it stood in America— a typist, a policeman, a bookkeeper, a farm hand. Once a tapster put the question, but doubtless it was a jest against our prohibition. We shall run on much of this as we progress, but I group its reiterated instance here. I do not know how far this discouragement is jus- tified—how deep the morass through which the country labors—but the bad morale speaks against Britain’s future. The government, I think, encourages emigra- tion. The exhibition at Wembley, where the wealth of Australia and Canada is shown, seems devised to whet this desire. All day the crowds move through these buildings and they stand in meditation before the pic- tures of extensive grainfields. On the dole for unemployment all industrious per-50 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY sons seemed to be of a common mind—that it had been a necessary sop to the wolves of revolution; but that it had thrown the laboring class into disastrous laziness, that it was a cruel burden on the taxpayer and that better times would not return until it had been demol- ished. A housekeeper told us that she was without a cook, because the dole was equal to the current wage. And why should a servant be expected to boil an inces- sant potato when she might sit at ease with even payment? ‘The dole, of course, is not intended for those who decline employment, but in a given instance mistakes are made. We were told, also,—though this may be gossip only—that a lazy painter, let us say, who could readily find work, would choose to register in another employment where jobs were scarce, and this scarcity would make him eligible to living on the dole. It was a general opinion that America had come to a monstrous wealth on the profits of the war and that now she proved a hard creditor. Beneath a courteous speech there was shown an undercurrent of bitterness at our prosperity. I usually offered a hint that the war had not so much created our national wealth as to have revealed it to Europe which had been somewhat in ignorance hitherto of our giant resources. The press of all countries is jingoistic for a dirty profit and it is a chief factor in the continuance of ill feeling between nations. Why are evening sheets yellower than those we read at breakfast? Those of London always have their tongue in their cheeks at any news from across the ocean. They feed on scandal from America where supply is large. They stress the ignorance of tourists.THE MAN WITH A FLY IN HIS BEER 51 Never, I think, except in the fever of the war when our troops were landing, has England in its heart been so friendly to America; for it is friendly even when in- structed in our violence, our stupidity, our greed, our raw manners, and in our wealth gained by the profits of the war. We hoisted out of the Four Elms tavern after our refreshment of beer and bread and cheese, and worked in an hour or so down to the village of Chiddingstone which stands beyond a placid mill pond. The village itself seems, as it were, a smaller pond; as if quiet cir- cumstance had banked its shallow flow of life and held it here beneath a glassy surface. The movement of the streets is no more than a shadow that ripples in the wind. A line of half-timbered houses is unbroken by any modern touch, and a lover of quiet and lazy beauty might fittingly set this tiny place near the top of any in this south of England. One of these half-timbered fronts contained the inn, and here we had lunch. It was after the hour when beer is legally sold. However, when the door had been locked in a fashion familiar in America, the landlord—but I must be discreet. It was ginger beer that filled our cups. After lunch we sat in a garden at the rear, a spot of softest turf quite walled about with roses. “T think” said Bill, “that I have sprung a blister.” And he threw himself upon the sod. And yet, for all its beauty, my impression of Chid- dingstone is one of shadow. This may arise from the evergreens of the churchyard that throw their black impression on the road. If the graveyard at Westerham52 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY seemed a sunny place sharing in the village life with friendly gate squeaking to the sport of children, its grassy plot inviting one fearlessly to thought of rest; here at Chiddingstone somewhat of the austerity of death lies on the street. It is far more lovely than Westerham, yet there seems a brooding melancholy. a ra J . — | ferro SO a ae _— —————— The austerity of death lies on the street Our silent mill pond stands in meditation of the future, and the slow movement of the surface feeds a shallow trickle to eternity. It is a town for saddened thought, and were verses written on the graveyard wall that flanks the street, inevitably their smooth measure must form an elegy. I have been told that the Elegy of Gray written at Stoke Poges is but a survivor from a poetic fashion thatTHE MAN WITH A FLY IN HIS BEER 63 once was general. A hundred others are forgotten; but his, supreme in form and thought, remains. And as a stranger treads these roads of England and looks at the country churches and their plots of grass he understands why they have gripped the hearts of poets. It is proper that religion should assist its lesson of immortality by this perpetual picture of beauty that persists beyond the grave. Here at Chiddingstone, on the first eight tombstones that I observed, I noted that death had come respec- tively at the following ages—78, 90, 73, 86, 79, 68, and 81—but here the venerable record was broken by a youth of 46. From a window, however, two ladies looked out upon the street who must shortly restore the ancient count. ‘Shall we start?” I asked. | “Well,” said Bill, “‘this grave of William Spelling, who shuffled off at eighty-nine years, looks good to me.” ‘‘What are you going to do?” I asked. “For a half hour, old corpse,’ he answered, “I shall sleep as soundly.”’ Flat down he threw himself, with feet crossed on the stone like a crusader, and his deep breathing mingled with the wind. Chiddingstone takes its name from a bowlder that is known as the chiding stone. The innkeeper had told us that nagging wives were silenced here—a device our newer civilization lacks—, but better authority gives a legend of its use as a druidical judgment seat. “And now”’ said Bill, ““I am ready.” ** All rested?”54 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY ‘Like a baby from his nap.”’ A mile beyond the town we found that our way turned into a private road. Hoy!” called out a servant from the lodge. ‘Is this the road to Penshurst?” I asked. “ANDO: 1b ain't.” I showed my map and set my finger on the spot. He looked at it as I might gaze upon a blueprint of a com- plicated engine. But now a shrewish woman put out her head. “Or- ders are orders,” she said. ‘‘And no one is to be let through.” On persuasion, however, she told us in a surly fashion how we might find a path across the fields which in a silly quarter of a mile would bring us back just inside the gate. They cared not a copper farthing that we broke the spirit of their instruction if only they kept the precise letter. So we made the circuit. We were now on a wooded road that crawled upon a ridge with cattle in the lower meadows. We crossed a bridge above a stream that seemed too idle to seek the ocean. It was shortly after five o’clock when we saw in the distance the walls of Penshurst House, eleven and a half miles from Westerham. Bill meditated whether it would be easier to make the finish on all fours. ‘‘T admire the locomotion of a centipede,” he said. ‘And why is that?” I asked. ‘* How little would a single blister fret him!” The inn at Penshurst is the Leicester Arms and it is of excellent accommodation except that my bed wasTHE MAN WITH A FLY IN HIS BEER 55 again a nest. Gentle reader, mistake me not! I write not of entomology. In form it was a nest, but of lively contents it held naught, until I clambered in. The mirror of my room was set in a frame upon the dresser, but it forever tilted forward as if it feared to oo cn) Viz (A PTEYNE FLOR Of lively contents it held naught, until I clambered in meet my eye. Mirrors hinged at the middle always have this complex of inferiority that keeps them bent upon the ground. I pushed a pair of stockings under- neath to lift its gloomy gaze to mine. Many china plates hung upon the walls—castles, parks and floating swans. Our dinner was of blackcock, in a room decorated with obsolete guns and the kind of pistols that Bob56 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY Acres used when he fought his duel. Presently an Englishman entered with his wife and daughters. He went first and sat down with the waitress to shove him in, letting the ladies shift as best they could. And to him the meat came first. We spoil our women in America. We passed the evening in the private bar where everyone aired his views on prohibition, for it is a topic that serves all around the world to stifle conversation. We are looked on as a strange unreasoning people who may be expected next to cut off a leg to thwart a nat- ural pleasure in its use. “We shall then” said Bull, “have crutch-runners down from Canada.”’ | It was bitter beer all round. Our pewter cups, nar- row at the brim, grew downward to a generous bottom. And this is the proper emblem for a man who, although he show his narrow self at first, grows to a wholesome girth as acquaintance ripens into friendship. It was here I asked if one might safely drink water from the tap. It was a new idea and each person in the room seemed to pass it to his neighbor. No one had tried it, but why not? They had heard it well spoken of. It was soft and soap lathered in it. It was probably as good as any. And if one liked to drink water—well, why not? It was early when we went to bed, and I read for an hour by candle as is proper in an English inn.**T feel like a dove,” said Bill CHAPTER V MORNING AT PENSHURST HERE was a trickle of soft rain through the night and, as it had not ceased when our bacon was stored away, we sat for a time in the parlor of the inn. Beezer was busy at the piano. Bill had plucked down a copy of the Koran and sat in medita- tion with occasional bursts of oriental wisdom. Presently our landlady entered to keep us company. She had managed the inn only for a year, to gain a livelihood broken by taxation. Such ill-fortune as hers, that shifts now so often the British classes, is of course regrettable; and yet, with impoverished countesses opening hat shops, there must be a grain of good in lessening that scorn with which the upper classes were used to look upon the merchant. There 5468 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY —_—— was rather a fine engraving of Napoleon on the wall, pieces of better furniture and many prints—a long set of the English Kings stretching down the hallway like the nightmare of Macbeth—, and this was all that she had saved from the wreckage of her fortune. Her pleasant manners, unsoured by poverty, would have graced a larger drawing-room. The inn had been till lately the property of Lord Lyle and Dudley who owns Penshurst, but it is at present one of a chain of inns belonging to a Tonbridge brewery. And now the weather cleared. “I feel like a dove,” said Bill. ‘“‘Let me out. I['ll look for Ararat.”’ It was his work on the Koran that changed the sky, for presently a timid sun peeped out like Noah from his ark to see if the waters were abating from the earth. Penshurst House opened at two o’clock. The en- trance to the park is under a stone gatehouse with a long drive outside the kitchen walls circling to the offices and stables. Adjacent to this drive flows the river Medway which is here but a tender stripling in the fields. Soon it will grow a beard at Rochester and carry a dirty load of shipping to the sea. The entrance to Penshurst for those on foot is through a lich gate at the top of what is called Leicester Square, which is a small flagged court set about with half-timbered houses, with a great elm squatting at the center in a tangle of spreading roots. Leicester Square in London, now the resort of music halls and late food, was named for these same Leicesters of Penshurst ofMORNING AT PENSHURST 59 whom Robert Dudley was the great queen’s favorite. Leicester, Kenilworth and Amy Robsart! It is an old story. This village square is of such an ancient aspect that at any of its leaded windows one might properly sit to the scanning of an Elizabethan verse, or hark to the T_—_—- Oo A 0 St rT * c\ a es 1h ‘ PEE ES ed yi Wha Hl ‘ch ye psu Leto — Liz | Sun C7ECUN EZ. mheny _—— A small flagged court set about with half-timbered houses later time when Waller sent here his pretty lines to Sacha- rissa until she threw him overboard for a nobler husband. Or with surer entertainment we might turn to Thomas Fuller, for in his Worthies he has written of Sir Philip Sidney who once lived here at Penshurst before he departed for the Dutch campaign where he was killed. ‘Such his appetite to learning,’ he writes, ““that he could never be fed fast enough there- with; and so quick and strong his digestion, that he60 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY soon turned it into wholesome nourishment, and thrived healthfully thereon.”’ Fuller’s English moves in a lim- pid stream of wit that shows its nearness to Elizabethan source. He continues with Sir Philip. ‘His home- bred abilities travel perfected with foreign accomplish- ments, and a sweet nature set a gloss upon both. He was so essential to the English court, that it seemed maimed without his company, being a complete master of matter and language, as his Arcadia doth evidence.” Such mellow flow of words befits a chair at a Tudor window. Any excuse is good that directs us to the witty pages of the Worthies. The path runs from the lich gate past the grave- yard. ‘Then it squeezes through a tricky gate that holds the cattle and crosses a meadow to the front of Penshurst House where a ditch and sunken wall sep- arate the closer lawn from the grazing land. This wall is cunningly contrived not to break the view of those who sit upon the terrace. Although there are many fine trees, from this viewpoint the meadow is open and sunny with just a touch of bareness. There is no hint of castle here, for all of Penshurst that now stands apparent was built when feudalism in its stricter sense had passed away and the country- side needed no bastions for its defense. ‘Listen, Rollo,” I said “for your uncle is about to instruct you in many curious matters.”’ I fixed him with my eye. ** Architecture” I began... . Architecture travels always hand in hand with political necessity and any ignorance of one can beMORNING AT PENSHURST 61 mended by the slightest knowledge of the other. Norman towers were not built for show. ‘They were the implements of William’s conquest, and the thick- ness of their walls is the measure of his task. The pyramids of Egypt were the battle of man’s vanity against eternity, but Norman stones fought a nearer foe. And so as the centuries brought peace their battle- ments were lightened into decoration and windows were pierced for comfort. I fancy, too, that the status of women was a factor; for the Renaissance in France produced buildings to meet the whim of courtesans. It is apparent then that most of these walls of Penshurst were constructed when domestic differences of state were no longer settled with a bombard and when wealth took its ease in country living. Women, doubt- less, passed on the fashion of its brocade but these outer walls are of men’s design without that lightness of tower and balcony that marks the contemporary century in France when Azay-le-Rideau and Chenon- ceaux were built. If life here was of a gorgeous texture, with Queen Elizabeth in pageantry on the lawn, it was at heart the home of men who gave their major hours to heavy public matters. The Tudor building is strong and solid, with theft from Norman and Gothic in tower, window and crenela- tion; for it was erected when the Reformation had laid its dead hand upon the symbols of the church and archi- tecture had turned to domestic use. What dogma lost in beauty, country living gained. Mullions, crowded down by a low-hung ceiling, trimmed flat the window’s soaring curve, and walls continued into a light fringe62 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY of indented stone at the hint of the former fighting tops of Norman castles. If one would travel with intelligence through a long- len e bk etn Ft te eo ek ee aS eee Sooo ——— — —— a oe ome eae aa —f/-" ww . — “4“t ‘ - a 4 ao . és ' ‘sf * * « | ] bs . \, R F Qt, 7 — ie = ae o \ / 1 if * i =e-e@"@ e764 —@~s (ul wh ANU “yh Ai HR MK ie / “9 IN) ly r Ta sit \ ttl, I aL : aly NM i i id eal Wa " AY HUY OO Hu ul t iu lt Hd thal Hie PLT AA UL(A MIMEUNE FLOR ‘2 “€_a@23@26-@-.8=—8 9-8 €-6 eh a a ee What dogma lost in beauty, country living gained settled country he must know these marks that distin- guish the periods of architecture. These are his obvious handbook to the past. And when he has learned their easy forms he must be content to stand in contest withMORNING AT PENSHURST 63 them before he cribs an answer. Each of a dozen centuries offers him a clew—the size of stone, the round arch, a dogtooth decoration, the undercutting of a water drip, a pointed window, the grouping of lancets beneath an upper light, perpendicular tracery, fan vaulting. These and a hundred other clews are his. Or if the vaulting seems not to match a window, if the style of ribbing is discordant with a weight of column, he will find it sport to put sequent dates upon the building and say that thus a chapel was added or that the wall of an older fabric was altered when its use was changed. This is a game more intense than bridge. And if to this knowledge a man can add sufficient facts of glass, tapestries, carved wood and brass, he can hold high his head before any sexton and wag his chin with wisdom. The original Penshurst was called Pencaster and shows in this the touch of Rome, but the great hall is the earliest building now extant and was erected toward the close of the fifteenth century. It was about two hundred years later that the property came into the possession of the Sidney family through the gift of Edward Sixth, and in the years following the general range of buildings was constructed. Sir Philip Sidney lived here. Here lived his nephew, Robert Dudley. All in good time Algernon Sidney was buried here. He urged against the killing of King Charles and won the wrath of Cromwell, but this did not pre- vent his execution when the royalists returned. And Waller wrote verses to Sacharissa. And Ben Jonson wrote verses, too, but did not send them to any young64 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY lady in particular. And Southey, Elizabeth Browning, Swinburne and a dozen others wrote verses and mailed them out to editors. ‘I think” said Beezer, for we had been sitting for a half hour on the damp grass of the meadow, “‘that I am stuffed. It’s time we went inside.”’ The great hall was built in the fifteenth century. Its fire was at the center, originally with an opening and cupola above to carry off the smoke. A pile of faggots now marks the place. ‘The roof is sharply pitched with timbers that rest on grotesque corbels. At the upper end of the hall is a dais on which the lord, his guests and family ate, at the lower end a screen with gallery above. Doors open past the screen to the cellar and kitchens, and from the dais a flight of stairs leads to a drawing-room where a narrow window looks down upon the hall. Through this window the lord of the manor, if his servants’ riot grew too loud, could spy upon their entertainment and count the tuns of beer and wine that were rolled up from the cellar. For the great hall primarily was not so much a place for guests and banquet as a common center for homely feudal living. A drawing-room was a withdrawing-room to which the family went from meals in order that the hall might be left to the evening uses of the servants. Here, below the dais, the retainers ate at long tables of heavy oak, each with a wooden trencher. At Knole House presently we shall see a list of one hundred and twenty servants who dined in the great hall. And these halls, too, in early times, were the common sleeping room of the men. They had no beds butMORNING AT PENSHURST 65 found comfort in the rushes of the floor as best they could, where perhaps bones had been thrown to the hungry dogs. Beds were for quality and women, with pillows only for those who lay in childbirth. I can arouse no enthusiasm for this floor of rushes. Its filth must have invited plague. “TI prefer my nest at the Leicester Arms,” said Bull. And yet, even if customs were foul and life lacked decency for common folk, I fancy that the servants must often have passed a jolly evening in this familiar company. A fire burns on the stones, with smoke drifting to the roof which is purple if an adverse wind checks the draft. Bows are restrung, tools are sharpened, clothing is patched, chess is played and songs are sung—the ballads that we gather into books. They hadna sail’d a league, a league, A league but barely three, When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud, And gurly grew the sea. If we are inclined to think of servants in a modern sense—a, transitory population that flits from house to house and spends its evenings at the movies—vwe shall have a false notion of this life. It was a mighty family that changed chiefly with a birth or death. When a man grew too feeble for war or the field he was shifted to the cellar, or he held the stirrup of his lord. As soon as his granddaughter was able to run alone she washed the trenchers or passed the meat at table. It was a life of discipline under despotic rule with harsh punish- ment for those who were sulky in their service; and yet66 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY it gave livelihood and security in dangerous times and bred a loyalty that now has largely passed away. A great fellow in a blazing jacket had explained the hall but, pocketing his fee, he now consigned us to a woman servant for the softer domestic rooms above. And with this change we left the feudal age for the period of Elizabeth. Nor do I see how anyone, although he be steeped in bookish history, can gain a picture of these spacious days if he is entirely ignorant of these Tudor houses. The past lives in these majestic rooms and galleries, with their portraits, their rugs and brocaded furni- ture, their Venetian mirrors and curtained beds, their trophies of gift and war and exploration. The cicerone spins her tale of ancient days. This is a painting by Van Dyke. It was in this bed, with silk new-made in a Flemish loom, that Elizabeth slept. Here is a portrait of Robert Dudley, who is given a bad name by Sir Walter Scott. And the past arises to the soft droning of her voice. In this chair the great queen sat with her satin slippers to the hearth. That embroidered screen kept the firelight from her face. That lacquered box held her colored silk. And now as the night advances she gossips of familiar matters—how Babbington, whom she had trusted, was caught in treason—, of Walsingham and his suspicions against the Queen of Scots. Drake’s ship, perhaps, lies at Deptford loading for its trip around the world. Or already there are rumors from Corunna that the great fleet gathers for its long-delayed attack. The talk may run to farthingales and the latest frippery ofMORNING AT PENSHURST cys dress—perhaps stockings made of silk which in England are a new creation. ‘“‘Like these, dear friends,’ with the lifting of a petticoat to display an ankle. A poet, too,—a common fellow of the Bank—what is his out- landish name?—has written such pretty rhymes in his play at Essex’s marriage that half the court have learned them for their table talk. °“‘In maiden medita- tion, fancy free. That is yourself, beyond a doubt, your majesty.” “So?” the queen remarks “It is a smooth phrase. We must have the fellow fetch his lute to Hampton Court.” | There is a sighing of wind in the winter chimney. Tapestries stir upon the wall. Brocades of musty wear regain their freshness. And the cicerone leads her flock to another room. Quiet days have fallen now on Penshurst. The galleries are closed except at the hour when visitors are shown about. The owner is a bachelor who keeps but a broken remnant of its servants. We saw him last night walking in the village street and he was dressed in common tweed without a feather or ribbon to link him up to braver days. Cattle graze upon his park where once swept a pageantry of silk. The mighty furniture hears now no gossip of the fall of favorites, and if any whisper fall across the windy night in these neglected rooms it is but an echo from an older world. “That’s checked off,’? said Beezer, who chafes in hard instruction. ‘“‘Let’s go back to lunch. I’m fed up with old Queen Liz.”And he skipped to show the perfection of his surgery CHAPTER VI TO THE ROAD AGAIN TI was the middle of the afternoon when we set out for Tunbridge Wells. Our last night’s rain had cleared the windy sky, and white clouds, tired of sedentary living, ran before us on a holiday. ‘“How’s the blister?” I asked. ‘All bandaged up,” said Bill. ‘‘Hojotoho!”” And he skipped to show the perfection of his surgery. Near by Farnham we left the highroad for a path across the fields. Ina grove on an upland slope a family had come for supper and as we passed there was a small commotion at the unpacking of the hampers and the spread of blankets on the ground. We were not so 68TO THE ROAD AGAIN 69 close that we could discover whether cold fowl or mutton were handed out, but it was a touch of pleasant country life. One stout gentleman sat in such easy comfort with an expectant plate upon his knees that, except for a change of dress, it might have been Mr. Pickwick at Manor Farm. ‘“T wonder where Manor Farm was,” said Bill. “It would be fun to find it.” “Off behind us to the north, not many miles from Rochester,” I answered. ‘“‘Do you remember how Mr. Winkle rode the tall horse?” “Now, shiny Villiam,’” quoted Bill, “‘give the gen’ lm’n the ribbons.’ ”’ We stopped a bit to watch the picnic. “Look at the old fellow eating!” said Bill. “The women feeding him. I'll bet it’s mutton.” Mutton and beef and bacon and sole, A boiled potato, a sweet, A kipper, string beans, a mug of beer! This is all that Englishmen eat. At Rusthall we came out on a highroad and were swept into a noise of traffic which was now at its worst on Saturday afternoon. Bill cried out at once “Oh, my soul!” and sat down hard for rest. But he was too stubborn to seek a lift in a public bus and presently ad- vanced with a gait that seemed a compound of a broken arch, a blister, a tight shoe, senility and paralysis. On a high common used for picnics we came in sight of Tunbridge Wells where we were to pass the night. Our hotel was the Swan, with a rear entrance from70 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY a stone-paved court that is known as the Pantiles where there is a band stand, a row of shops for trinkets and a spring of healing waters now fallen out of fashion. Young Mr. Warrington of Virginia came once to Tunbridge Wells in attendance on his wicked aunt to gain acquaintance with the world of fashion, its bad hours, high gambling and easy virtue. And here of a morning on the Pantiles he saw many famous men— Chesterfield, with star and ribbon; Johnson, who scarcely consented to touch his beaver in return to his lordship’s greeting; Richardson, with Clarissa newly written, walking in a halo of female worship. Two hundred years ago Tunbridge Wells was of lofty fashion for wit and wealth and title, and a close rival of Bath. I have no doubt that many novelists preceded Thack- eray in sending their heroes to Tunbridge to furnish out a spicy chapter; just as a writer of our day chooses Cannes or Aix-les-Bains if he fears that otherwise his plot grows dull. “Do our rooms face the Pantiles?”’ I asked the lady of the wicket. ‘I do not know,”’ she answered. ‘** Perhaps.” ** Perhaps?” *T have not been to look. Ask the porter!” I saw at once that my inquiry was an insult to her station. In England no lady at a wicket demeans herself with trivial knowledge; or perhaps she is in compact with the porter lest he lose his tip. ““Can we drink the water from the tap?” I asked. ‘There ain’t no reason why you shouldn’t.’” And then she added, ““If you like it.”’TO THE ROAD AGAIN 71 On a common across from the hotel there was a kind of traveling show—a thing of whirligigs and booths, of penny knickknacks and painted wagons. Beezer looked at it fondly from the window and, as one man, we decided on a vulgar evening. These shows are of gypsy entertainment among the smaller towns and they play for a week or less and take to the road again. Their amusements are much like those of cheaper American resorts on the edge of cities, but they are of a dingier pattern without our large excitement and flash of electric light. Our crowds, too, are of many races and are touched with something continental. They are of franker uproar and more spontaneous outcry. They are dressed better, although only of tawdry smartness, and they are looser in extrav- agance. The English crowd is shabby by comparison, and its women wear rusty bonnets from an upper shelf. The crowd is rheumatic, feeble in the joints and with lack of teeth. When it indulges in an evening entertain- ment it takes, as the phrase goes, its pleasure sadly. One wonders if this sodden gathering is of the race that conquered the world. But in England there are two races—the conquering race descended from feudal days, and another which always preserves its sense of inferior station. At this show in Tunbridge Wells a tiny train circled through a painted canvas tunnel, and the flash of darkness was almost too brief for love. A Palace of Fun and Mystery was a single room upon a cart; and this, too, was a chance for the squeezing of hands. Airships circled around a central shaft and swung12 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY out on the ends of chains, so here again a lady must be grappled in the arms. And all of these catchpennies were crowded, for love is a whip to lash the nag extrav- agance. But the favorite choice was a revolving disk of polished surface. Here a young man sat at the very middle with legs outspread and a young lady side- ps Mi H ) i / ey uA TU wt i | FAL Y ha 4 NK ' i] \ i) iT r ry i} Feeble in the joints and with lack of teeth saddle across his knees. Her arms were placed about his neck and she was hugged close for economy of space. Presently, as the speed of the disk increased, they were thrown from their balance and were shot forward to the gutter with more than a flash of cotton stocking. It was but a shallow pretense of modesty that she clutched her skirts, for the end was ordained and her legs as familiar as her garter. A master of ceremonies arranged these contests with centrifugal force, with glib remarks of double meaning that raisedTO THE ROAD AGAIN 78 a grin. If accepted lovers did not offer themselves, he chose partners at random through the crowd in order that strangers might meet in pleasant circumstance. Nor did any girl decline his invitation. But this is but a vulgar fallen entertainment, for Tunbridge Wells flourished two hundred years ago and now lives only in the twilight of its grandeur. Fuller’s Worthies still les on my desk, for yesterday I drew it down for Penshurst. ‘The first discovery of this water. ... he writes, “‘is believed from a footman of a Dutch lord, who passed this way, and drinking thereof found it in taste very like to that of the Spa in Germany.” But of fashion he writes nothing, for the excellent reason that Fuller lived before the parade of lace set in. A legend explains that St. Dunstan once took the Devil by the nose with red-hot tongs and that the Devil, to ease his pain, thrust it in the spring. ‘““And I suppose”’ said Beezer, “‘that is the reason why it tastes of sulphur.” “Quite right, Rollo!” I replied. It was in sixteen hundred and six that the value of the spring was discovered. In sixteen thirty, so quickly did its fame arise, Queen Henrietta, journeying here at the bidding of her physician, was forced to camp upon the downs for lack of proper housing in the throng. Charles the Second’s Queen took up her residence here and it was her patronage that brought fashion to the town. Hotels and pavilions were built and by the end of the century Tunbridge Wells was in high favor with the idle rich. It was about two hundred years ago that a traveler4 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY by the name of Anthony Hamilton put up at the Wells. “The company though always numerous,” he wrote, “is always select; since those who repair thither for diversion ever exceed the number of those who go thither for health, everything there breathes mirth and pleasure; constraint is banished, familiarity is established upon the first acquaintance, and joy and pleasure are the sole sovereigns of the place. The company” he continued, “are accommodated with lodgings in little, clean and convenient habitations that lie straggling and separated from each other, a mile and a half all around the Wells, where the company meet in the morning; this place consists of a long walk, shaded by spreading trees, under which they walk while they are drinking the waters; on one side of this walk is a long row of shops, plentifully stocked with all manner of toys, lace, gloves, stockings, and where there is raffling, as at Paris, in the Foire de Saint Ger- main; on the other side of the walk is the market, and, as it is the custom here for every person to buy their own provisions, care is taken that nothing offensive appears on the stalls. ... As soon as the evening comes every one quits his little palace to assemble on the bowling green, where, in the open air, those who choose dance upon a turf more soft and smooth than the finest carpet in the world.”’ We shall leave our inquiry here. The Lido and St. Dinar are fashion’s current whim. The Pantiles lie silent and forgotten beneath our window.A royal coat of arms CHAPTER VII A DIRTY INN TO END THE DAY Fifteen years ago I spent several days here at a hotel facing on Mt. Ephraim which is common land adjacent to the town. The hotel had been full of prim little ladies whose husbands slaved in London or already had shuffled off to clear their widows’ path. Each of these ladies gave her affection to a small dog that sat on a chair at her table and sniffed for food. Talk at breakfast was whether Flossie had slept. Or perhaps she had scampered in the dew and had caught snuffles. Old ladies and dogs spent their mornings on the Pantiles, to which they were wheeled in roller chairs with a boyto push. The band played, the ladies knitted, the dogs jumped for the balls of worsted as often as they fell, and an old woman peddled vile water from the spring. It was altogether stupid and delightful, and seemed a dear but muddy sediment left in the pool of fashion. PL rite sea WELLS was a disappointment. 7576 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY On this present visit we saw none of this. It was after hours on the Pantiles for the knitters of Mt. Ephraim. Our hotel, in the center of the town, was built for commerce rather than diversion; so we missed the sniffing dogs. The old woman had gone home with her tin dipper. Last night’s circus, also, had shocked us from the past. We had fallen on a Saturday night when folk live most intensely in the present and they had destroyed illusion and all the touches of the eighteenth century. Other days, other diversions! For us the whirling disk and cotton legs! We were afoot at ten o’clock up a broad street of well-kept houses where already there was a showing of sober cloth for church. Our road lay wide and tame through Frant with now and then a Sunday motor abroad upon a picnic. After Frant we headed to the southeast with a fine valley on our right. We had walked for five miles when we came to an inn beside the road near Wadhurst station, and here we had lunch. The private bar was filled with stuffed birds and animals under glass, and there was a clock that did not run. We have found that the clocks of England usually live this sedentary life. I cannot be sure whether it is an apathy that rises with the dole, or whether these hills and valleys prosper best in ignorance how fast the sun shall sink. Where Nor- man walls are overgrown with ivy and time turns backward with longing for a world now gone, of what service are clocks that mark but the present hour? After lunch we sat on a bench before the inn andA DIRTY INN TO END THE DAY We contemplated a string of box cars and signboards (rare in England) that commended Bovril, Jeyes Fluid and Whitbread’s Bottled Beer. f yet My" Bill sat squarely on a thistle “What is Jeyes Fluid?” asked Bill. “I must try it. Does it compare with stout?” “Tt is a disinfectant,” I answered. Then to the road again, much refreshed by our lunch and meditation! In another hour, however, we sat for another rest and it was here, as I recall, that Bull sat squarely on a thistle and arose with an “Oh, my soul!” The snail’s on the thorn! is a false expression of happiness and tranquillity. Presently a young man came up and was in great amazement to learn we were so far from home. He lived with his mother just down the road. He had served with the armies in France and had been a po- liceman in London; but, since his discharge, Wadhurst78 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY where we had lunched had been his farthest journey. He asked us the fare to Canada and shook his head in gloomy thought. When we arose he walked along with us and pointed out his mother at a window. It was a pretty cottage on a hill, above a range of country tinted bright with sun. And as we walked the valley widened out, lingered at our stride and closed behind us. Imperceptibly there was a shifting of the hills upon their passive base, as 1f our footsteps were the march of time. At Ticehurst near five o’clock the Duke of York’s hotel was locked, nor could any pounding rouse the Duke. Each district has its hours, set by a local magistrate, when drink may not be served, and during these hours sometimes a country inn will shut not only its bar but its outside door as well. Bill ham- mered on the panel like one of the foolish virgins, for no one answered. Or rather, in his voice was the weakening whisper of Tintagiles, as he stood at the frightful gate of—at the frightful gate of—whatever it was that he stood with weakening whisper at the frightful gate of. Maeterlinck makes these things too hard. Buill—note the value of plain speech!—pounded on the tavern door that led inward to the bar because he was tired and thirsty and because the Duke was still asleep and would not let him in for a mug of stout. Then Bill huddled himself wearily on the step and ran a dry tongue around the parched margin of his mouth. “Think of it,” he said. “This happens in Merry England. One might as well walk to East Liverpool.”A DIRTY INN TO END THE DAY “Where is that?” asked Beezer. “A dry town” he answered, ‘“‘in Ohio.”’ There was, however, a smaller tavern across the street. Here we were told that a pint of beer would be supplied us if we were so good as to sit back from the window. But no beds were left. At the week-end there is an exodus from London of folk in char-a-bancs, and Ticehurst lies on one of the highways to the Chan- nel. The returning tide of trippers runs high on Sunday night, and already there was a stirring in the bar to prepare for the evening’s thirst. “Ah,” said Beezer, “‘a touch of Tennyson— 66 6 . such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full of sound and foam.’ ”’ **Misquoted vilely,’’ I replied. **An improvement,” said Beezer. Bill swished his stout in a circle around his mug. **Where is the nearest inn?” he asked. ‘**At Hurst Green.”’ *‘And the distance?”’ **More’n three miles.”’ “Tl die first,” said Bill, and he groaned inside his mug. Those pretty boots of his, which I have com- mended for their beauty in a drawing-room, had done their dirty work. Presently he beckoned to the landlord. “I’m a poor man,” he said, “but Ill give my lovely daughter dowered with half my kingdom to him who will trans- port me to Hurst Green.” | ‘Twelve shillings for a Ford,” said the landlord. **Done!”’ said Bill.I 80 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY Beezer and I set out on foot, and soon he passed us lolling in easy comfort. A brisk wind had brushed the film of distance from the hills; and great clouds ran across the sky, as if they, too, had spent the holidays at Margate and now re- freshed were pelting up to town for Monday’s business. Jere nectar Lolling in easy comfort But char-d-bancs were full of sleepy folk who had dug in the sand all day or dropped their thriftless pennies into cheap amusement. They leaned against one another cheek to cheek and their peaceful breathing was lost in the rumble of the wheels. At Hurst Green there was the usual uproar of trip- pers who lay off for drink. Bill, of course, had alreadyA DIRTY INN TO END THE DAY 81 arrived and he met us on the steps with word that we could get beds only when the crowd had been served their tea—one room surely and another if a man failed to come who had written for accommodation. All through the inn there was a running about with trays and cups, collisions in the hallway of food coming up and empties going down, the tramp of impatient feet, calls for spoons and sugar, the spilling of careless liquor and a general swilling in the bar which was foul beyond excuse. Char-a-banes honked outside to hurry up their passengers and gentlemen issued from the tap wiping their lips upon their sleeves. We escaped from this hubbub and found a corner of the garden at the rear where we were safe from being splashed. ‘Does it occur to you” said Bill, “that except for the trivet at the hearth and the milk-maid’s stool there are no creatures in all the world which have three legs?” ‘The thought had not struck me,” I confessed. ““Tt’s odd,” said Bill. “‘Bipeds we have, quadrupeds, six-, elght-, ten-legged animals; but always their legs are of an even number. Consider the zoo! Can you remember one?” “But with an odd number they would not balance,” I objected. “‘A boat must have a like number of oars each side.” ‘Your reasoning is shallow,” answered Bill. ‘They would wobble,” I persisted. “Not at all. The milk-stool is quite firm. Ah, I had forgotten the kangaroo; but he is in a manner an experi- ment. His tail isa kind of leg and aids him in locomotion. He balances, then leaps. The tail surely was not con-— >82 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY trived merely to swish at flies. The monkey puts it to frequent use. With him it is in a sense a leg. Half of his agility comes from it. But nature, having advanced so far, abandoned the experiment.”’ “And what conclusion do you draw from this?” I asked. “On a walking trip” Bill answered, and his tone was of a feeble melancholy, ““I would find it convenient to have an extra leg to throw into service at four o'clock. Until that hour it might dangle behind and be a pas- senger. But with it for substitute like an extra tire, one blister would not retard my speed.” He stretched himself upon the grass. He pulled his cap across his eyes and mouth. But his brain was too busy for sleep. Presently he spoke, in rather a muffled manner, through his cap. “T was thinking” he began, “‘that if man had three legs a waltz would be his marching tune. Bing bung bung, bing bung bung!” “And so it would. If all of them were working.”’ “But waltzes have something dreamy in their com- position. They are not tunes to stir the vigor. They are sentimental—persuasive to laziness. I would sit much by the roadside, in that event, in meditation of far-off matters.” “You speak the truth,” I answered. ‘““An army of three legs could not go forth to battle to the present tump-tump of the inspiring drum. Con- sider the waltzes that you know! Is there one of them that could hurry an army on the march? With three legs and a waltz, each man would reflect on a girl he hadA DIRTY INN TO END THE DAY 83 left behind. Forward! Waltz! It would be a blow to war.” ‘And so it would,” I answered. “Much of our vigor” continued Bill, still speaking through his cap, “comes because, being bipeds, we are fitted to the greater vigor of four-beat time. From it we get our energy, our will to conquer the infinite. With three legs our fiber would relax. We would move on dreams and sentiment.” “Sleep a bit,” I interrupted. “Poor fellow, you have need of rest.”’ “Quite right,” said Bill. He stretched his two feet into space as if they groped for worlds unknown, and his snoring mingled in the wind. It was already twilight before the thunder of the char-a-bancs had faded to the north. Inthe wreckage of the dining room, where a dog nosed about for salvage, we were served cold fowl and hunks of bread. “Two hundred and forty teas we’ve served today,” our hostess said. “On any night but Saturday and Sunday I could have fed you better.” She drew a sleeve across her dirty face. “I’m that tired on Sun- day night.” ‘How does it come” I asked, “that a royal coat of arms hangs above your door?” “Oh that! Queen Victoria was once saved from a runaway just in front. A gentleman who lived near by ran out and seized the horses. And here she slept—in the room that the tall gentleman has.” Bill’s room! And he lay on the coverlet because it was the cleanest stratum of his bed.84 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY Beezer and IJ slept at the back and from the window we looked down upon a midden of broken food that had been thrown out from the kitchen. I went over my bed by candlelight; but life, if it existed, rested from its labor. Nor was my rest disturbed. Here, let me add, that only at Hurst Green and one other place was our inn unwholesome. Bill hereafter always spoke of this place as Robin's Nest—why, I do not know—and with a shudder. Yet the landlady was an obliging soul and we were sorry for her distress.Tio, ' EN Wy) lA SD) Uy, A\\2 Ju 4Q POCCUME mooie —.. An old blind man had been sunning himself CHAPTER VIII INTRODUCING A BLIND MAN AND THE LADY POMFRET- DAWKEN EK were abroad early Monday morning and \ \ walked through high and windy country to the south. Turning to the east two miles short of Robertsbridge, presently we passed a wooden tower where one might climb an extra forty feet for a penny and a further view. But where nature has already piled the hills to a fitting eminence such addi- tion is a vain conceit. Who but a fool would mount a ladder to increase the stature of the Alps, or fetch a stool to Matterhorn? There are such structures in the Berkshires, on all mountains that tourists fre- quent; and they do but emphasize man’s littleness when he stands before his God. And so, meditating sourly on the folly of travelers, 8586 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY we passed beyond the hill and came to a certain Junc- tion Inn, set where two roads crossed, and here we rested on a bench before the door. Bill and Beezer are great cronies for discussion; and on this occasion, leaving Parsifal and Galli-Curei which are their usual contention, they came to a hot dispute whether the ax or the electric chair were the softer death. Beezer leaned to the electric chair; and Bull, to urge his contrary argument for the ax, lifted up both arms and brought them down in a mighty swing to show how speedily death descends when the headsman is master of his craft. His persuasion was too emphatic, for suddenly— pat upon the stroke!—the bench collapsed and threw them to the ground. An old blind man had been sunning himself at the other end with cane against his chin, and he also went down in the crash. Bull picked him up, dusted him off and led him to the tap to drown all troubles in a mug of beer. The old fellow was good- natured at the accident and lamented with a twinkling smile that the argument had been so rudely inter- rupted. It had been a pleasant break from his monot- onous meditation and every few minutes, as the thought of it recurred, he fell to chuckles. “‘An’ have ye con- sidered hangin’?” he asked. “It’s not so bad, they say as knows.” Though sunlight is kept forever from the blind, its glow reaches to the heart and warms their disposition. The old man told us that he had come down from the north through all the rush of London without attendant, to spend a holiday with his daughter who ran theA BLIND MAN AND LADY POMFRET-DAWKEN 87 tavern. There had been a change of busses in the city, but a stranger had taken his elbow at the curb; for strangers were always kind. This is the reason of a blind man’s sunny thought. His infirmity receives such an instant sympathy and care that he grows to think that every one is commonly as good all through the ugly day as in that one moment when he is led across to safety. In this thankful estimate of others the sunlight reaches to the blind. To know one is to know a philosopher of kindly judgment and happy thought. And one might suppose that half the sorrow of ordinary lives enters at the portal of the eyes. If shut and sealed we are a strong citadel against attack. It was the granddaughter of our blind man who brought the mugs, and he yielded to a second filling and tapped her hand in mute affection. He confided as we left him that he had been won by Bill’s argument to vote in favor of the ax. We now pitched off the hills to the lower grassy land that les along the Rother; and here, on an island in a lake no larger than a pond, we saw among the trees the crenelated walls of Bodiam Castle. Any guidebook worth its salt will tell you that Bodiam Castle was built in the fourteenth century by sir Edward Dalyngruge, a soldier of Cressy and Poictiers on his return from France; and there are marks inside of window, vault and pointed arch that corroborate the date. He employed the science of the continent, the pattern of the French, to make this. a stronghold secure against attack. But it is an expert eye that can squint wisely on the texture of a wall and tell thereby= 7m Nar rF To one who lies on the grassy bank beyond i if fs" —A BLIND MAN AND LADY POMFRET-DAWKEN 89 the precise turning of the centuries and the source of its builder’s theft. And to one who lies on the grassy bank beyond the still waters of the lake—if any thought at all shall come to break a lazy hour—it will be the days of conquering William that present themselves. Facts are for a narrow schoolroom, to be brushed aside upon a holiday. These battlemented towers that rise from their cool shadow in the lily pads, these walls looped for stone and arrow, seem to belong to the years when the Norman Duke first seized the land and held it roughly. Senlac to the south, where he broke the Saxon force, is here but the flight of a lazy bird; and any taller spire of Battle Abbey, if it stood on tiptoe, could see us across the hills. The shallow Rother washes the meadows to the right but, in its greater depth when the sea swept up to Rye and drowned the fields, heavy ships from France might have landed their clumsy ordnance here. In the trees there stirs the song of far-off battles, when Taillefer tossed his spear and rushed with a cry against his enemies. It is the Norman charge that sounds upon the stillness of the noon and fetches word that Harold has been slain and lies among his broken men. Fancy constructs what world it will. It throws aside its book. And where it shall discover that walls look down on silent water to catch their beauty on the surface, it will loosely meditate how vanity survives its youth. This tower, like a gray coquette whose daring eyes are dim, still smooths its wrinkles at a glass and thinks of future conquest. The wind that rubs upon its cheek is the finger of a waiting maid in patient office of perfection.90 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY It must be that such silly fancies moved us all, for presently Bill contrived for Bodiam a whole tissue of absurdity. It seems, for so he argued, that once in older times a lady by the name of Pomfret-Dawken this is pure invention—lived within these walls and did service to the Duchess as a genteel companion to amuse her evenings. She was slipping a bit from youth, but so also was the Duchess. Pomfret, however, although her figure was overplump (the point whereof will presently appear), still retained her looks and a challenge of the eye; whereas the Duchess had so abominable a taste for purple turbans—doubtless Bill’s anachronism, rising from his observation of a present fashion in every inn where ladies gathered for their tea a taste for purple turbans, I repeat, that as time went on she cooled the ardor of his Grace. She may, also, have worn a mobcap in to breakfast and slippers that slapped against her heels; and all of us know that these defects are fatal unto love. The moon itself is not so inconstant as the husband of an unbrushed wife. ‘“She ate crackers in bed,”’ said Bill, “‘which fretted his lordship much.” Now it was the custom of the times—what times, God knows!—for ladies to sit of an evening at the hearth and work upon a frame a pink cupid behind a ribbon. Or they played at draughts with a flaring wick within a sconce, dealing out gossip with the moves. His Grace, meantime, being of the stuff that all men are, passed his evenings in the rough employment ofA BLIND MAN AND LADY POMFRET-DAWKEN 91 the hall where he drank confusion to the King of France and rolled with a hiccough up to bed. What was the Duchess’s surprise therefore when, on one particularly windy night when thirst should have raged its worst, in walks the Duke as nearly sober as con- sorted with the habit of the times and takes his place between the ladies at the board. It was an attention so foreign to his practice that the Duchess scanned him with a shrewd lorgnette. Then she turned to Pomfret, if by chance she had an explana- tion. It was the Duchess’s intuition that suspected trouble in Pomfret’s demure dropping of her eyes. Ladies should be careful in such matters, for a lorgnette pierces to the soul. The sky is not so open as a heart that is discovered by a rival. Pomfret, Bill asserts, had an upturned nose. Such noses, although they are not classical, yet lend them- selves to the interest of a manly glance. And certainly the candle’s yellow flare dealt kindly with her face and quite rubbed out a freckle here and there that dulled her beauty in the sun. And yet domestic peace might still have prospered had not the Duke gone to fetch his boots and called to Pomfret to assist him in the darkened closet. There came out no sound of rummaging upon the Duchess’s listening ear, although his Grace usually in such quest overturned a shelf or two and made a clatter among the boxes. When at last they issued from the shadow there burned a rosy light on Pomfret’s cheeks beyond any tinting of the candle. Pomfret was a minx. She had been kissed among the boots. That night theyROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY a played at draughts no more and the Duchess’s pillow was wet with tears. Now any woman of our modern times would have sought to mend matters by attention to her face and UL AN CHCUME FLORY, { c YY | | ( ) fj Pe MA ot | VR | \ JO se ZA J f A — - oh Mt ' r}/ wii ey / 4 CLS li J t There burned a rosy light on Pomfret’s cheeks figure. She would have sworn off waffles, touched her lips with ruddy juice and changed her taste from purple bonnets. But the Duchess, although she grieved, still kept her habit of sweetened tarts. Bull does not record whether the worsted cupid suffered, but certainly sheA BLIND MAN AND LADY POMFRET-DAWKEN 93 worked with languid fingers. Regularly now the Duke gave his evenings to the drawing-room, and regularly he fetched his boots with Pomfret-Dawken’s help. If her face returned no more in blushes, it merely showed | J 4A PISCYIVE af NE 1 \ WE}. | Ass = md $e 2 | 5 yy a / WE f WIE WWE A lorgnette pierces to the soul how her guilt grew hard. ‘This is where the first act ends,’ said Bill. It was when matters had progressed so far that war broke out in France. When the message came it was boots again that night, but five minutes in the dark94 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY were stretched to ten. And when at dawn the iron Duke took to horse and waved his hand beyond the moat it was Pomfret’s fluttering heart that followed him. And now Bill was pleased to skip a year and set his tale on a night of spring when battles had been fought and his Grace returned in triumph. At noon a horseman came with word that the Duke had landed from his ship and that a bed be aired for his arrival. A fresh spigot was hammered into place. The village band was gathered, and all afternoon the oboe practiced. During the early evening as they waited the Duchess and Pomfret-Dawken played at draughts as usual, but dark thoughts were in the mind of each. And now Pomfret plead excuse—a headache from a second helping of the curried eels that swarmed the moat— and sought, as she said, her room. For a time the Duchess gazed at her cupid with the floating ribbon, and his hard arrow she turned against her heart. entered her head. Then an idea—a rarity for her She seeks a shawl. She thrusts her slippers into new galoshes. Black night is on the window. Is the woman mad? She runs along the darkened corridor. She climbs with quickened puff the circular stairs of stone. She issues on the battlements. It is a night of stars and flying clouds, but she comes with darker purpose. She listens. A faint rumor of horses’ feet beats upon the stillness of a far-off road. It is her unfaithful lord returning from the war, with thoughts doubtless on the boot-closet where first Pom- fret had been kissed. The Duchess stands in a shad-A BLIND MAN AND LADY POMFRET-DAWKEN 96 owed cranny of the wall and leans forward to the silent waters of the moat. How fitting to end it all, with those dull sounds of horse for a muffled drum of death! Wildly beats her heart. And now she is conscious that she is not alone. There is a cloaked figure in the other cranny of the wall. Can it be—? The Duchess steals forward in her new galoshes. It is. Her eye grows red upon the darkness of the night. It is so, dear Rollo, that hatred is engendered in the heart. Never, never let your passions rise! “See,” says Bill, “that is the very tower, the one at the corner with the crenelated top.” And now fierce anger sweeps upon the Duchess. She leaps forward with a cry. She seizes her enemy by the knees. She tugs and heaves! But her victim is too heavy. Ah! Here is a hole where oil is poured against assault. With sly cunning she drops her burden. She stuffs her in. For a moment Pomfret’s plumpness thwarts her. Shall waffles save a life? The Duchess rests both galoshes on her head. She stamps her down. A splash! The ripples widen into circles. The dull pounding of horses’ hoofs is a muffled drum. ‘And here is a poignant touch to finish,” says Bill. “When the body was found next day it was a nest— a nest of eels—eels like those the Duchess had eaten curried. And so she and the Duke were married and lived happily ever afterward. But from that time on. his Grace confined himself to tripe.”’ Bill was so proud of his plot that henceforth on our96 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY travels he was forever inventing a Pomfret-Dawken of some later generation to live in any castle that we saw. Nor did he hold her entirely to an ancient background. “Pomfret!” he would cry in a tone supposed to be that of Victoria at Balmoral, ‘‘Pomfret! Bring me out my purple turban! I’m off to church. Dawken! My lavender organdie, Disraeli comes to dine!” If any dumpy figure sat near us at tea or climbed to a bus top for a seat, Bill would nudge us and confide that this was a great-granddaughter of that older Pomfret of Bodiam who loved not wisely but too well. We now paid a shilling at a cottage for admission and crossed the causeway of the castle. By God's mercy there was no guide to drone his story. Bill's had been enough. So we climbed the walls, ignorant and happy. A group of school children, meantime, were led around by a tutor whose moralizing finger pointed out a lesson; but we gave him a wide berth as one who plants a fester on a holiday. These inner buildings are quite destroyed, but stumpy walls still show the outline of hall and armory and kitchen. Here and there a generous window opens from what must have been a lady’s chamber, and its tracery showed it to be of the fourteenth century. And I recall a pointed archway at the postern. I had been perplexed by the outer walls but the inside cleared the riddle and gave the clew to a later date. We clambered down to a cellar where a round pool of black unhealthful water is fed from the moat outside. A filth of scum floated on the surface, and this is what they drank in time of siege. Fever must have beenA BLIND MAN AND LADY POMFRET-DAWKEN 97 stronger than any cannon to subdue the castle. It was a vaulted room of stone, black with the shadows of the past as if magic stirred a dirty mixture. i 1Q L9CCOM on Black with the shadows of the past We stood with unbent heads in the prodigious chimney of the kitchen. We climbed a tower and98 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY leaned across the indented parapet to see the sluggish waters far below. Bull whispered as he drew us close. “Look!” And he pointed to a dizzy hole that opened at our feet. “Here is the place where the Duchess stuffed Pomfret-Dawken through. She stuck in her wopse of petticoats, till the Duchess pressed her down.’ >Seas nore. neem aa ae ee Seen FLO y. The cruise of the Forget-Me-Not CHAPTER IX THE CRUISE OF THE FORGET-ME-NOT E now had lunch at a nearby inn. We asked \ \ for an omelet, and the landlady said she had heard of such things and would do her best. It proved to be a doormat—badly burned, as if already it had been used for dirty feet. We had walked this morning no more than six miles, but Bill had worked so hard on Pomfret-Dawken—or perhaps it was the doormat—that a general languor now seized his legs. He declared that he would collapse if he essayed the sixteen miles to Rye where we had hoped to pass the night. As the captain of the tour I was ruminating on the problem and studying the map for a nearer town, when I observed that the Rother runs out to sea at Rye. And here we were on its upper course where, though it dwindled to a string, it still had depth. 99100 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY ‘How about a boat?” said Beezer. ‘““Simpleberry, my very thought!”’ So I cast about to find one. Presently a woman with one arm in a sling informed me that her husband owned a craft and that it was ours to Rye for an even pound. Her husband now arrived and together we went to the river where we found a rowboat quite filled with water and a hop-toad on the thwart beside the oars. We pulled the boat to the bank, emptied it and the captain clamped a gas engine at the stern. “Not so bad,” he said, when he had rubbed the mud from the seats with a pair of discarded trousers which he kept for the purpose in the locker. “‘I call her the Forget-Me-Not.”’ ‘““Forget-Me-Not,” said Bill, ““Not so long, sweet ghost, as reason holds its seat.” The gas engine proceeded to cough from its single fretful lung and we climbed aboard. Beezer was preoccupied and silent. ““What’s the trouble?” I asked. “T was thinking” he answered, “how Pomfret-Daw- ken was drowned. I couldn’t eat an eel, not if I tried.”’ ‘Most delicious food,” said Bill. “All persons who have moats scoop them up for dinner. Much cherished by the older aristocracy. A favorite dish of Lady Jane.” ‘Who was she?” asked Beezer. SAh~ said Bill. “The Lady Jane was tall and slim, The Lady Jane was fair. She was a lady of the Ingoldsby Legends. A tragic story with some humor. Very fond of eels she was.THE CRUISE OF THE FORGET-ME-NOT 101 Her husband was drowned. Was fished up a week later covered with them. Two in each pocket. Six in his boots!” ‘And what did Lady Jane do?” “She behaved abominably. She dined on the catch that night. So unlike the Duke I have been telling you of. Curried! Terrible! And this, Beezer—this is what she said afterward, when she folded up her napkin. * ‘Eels a many I’ve ate; but any So good ne’er tasted before! They’re a fish, too, of which I’m remarkably fond— Go—pop Sir Thomas again in the pond— Poor dear!—HE’LL CATCH US SOME MORE!’ ” Horrible!” said Beezer. “Ah, Rollo,” said Bill, “she loved them, just as you love pink marshmallows. Cruel creatures, women! Be careful whom you invite to your school dances. And now be of better cheer! See how swiftly we travel through the water!” The Rother, although it has the title of a river, is more like a canal that has lost its job and wanders out of work. It may, indeed, bear a current to the ocean but it is so sluggish that a fallen leaf scarcely moves, turning idly without a rudder. It loops through flat meadows with surface deep below the level of the grass, and it is only the taller scenery that peeps at you above—perhaps a village spire, a tree upon a hill or the heads of cattle that graze along the bank. A lane that is flanked by buildings gives as wide a view. And to travel on such a stream is to take a journey of close seclusion and of peace, with but the clouds for company.102 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY I lay with my head upon a thwart at the bottom of the boat and, until a leak flowed in on me, I reclined in fitful sleep. I was interrupted by our captain’s voice. “T say,” he called, “‘Can’t you pull about a bit?” In front of us a coal barge lay obliquely across the stream and blocked the way. A plank had been thrown to a wharf and two men were unloading with wheelbarrows. In America, where all men are created equal for assault, this would have led to violent denun- ciation and rejoinder. But in England such matters are settled with a softer hand. “T’ll be back before supper,” our captain added, “ond I'll stand a treat of bitter for you and your mates.” And so the bargees heaved and pushed, until a little passage lay along the bank through which we squeezed. But the Forget-Me-Not had overdone its strength. It lay exhausted, too weak to cough. The captain did all the things that one does in such an emergency. He pulled at wires and squinted inside the invalid for any obvious complaint. ‘“‘She never done this before,” said he. Then he mopped his brow and lighted his pipe, as if meditation might provide a cure. We were to all appearance marooned in an extensive marsh that ended only with the hills. Several miles of squashy footing lay about us and we were dead at the center of it. Salt grasses waved at the margin of the river, but there were no cattle now or village towers. The captain lifted out his pipe and spat gravely at the river. “It was just this afternoon I was sayin’THE CRUISE OF THE FORGET-ME-NOT 103 I'd clean that engine. And now look at the danged thing. Any hurry?” “Time is made for slaves,” said Bill. There was a pair of oars, and with much knocking of the knuckles I rowed for a half hour. Nor do I see b \ ets myo ee — jE “ OO SSS SS =—— I Lh ma /: “Time is made for slaves,”’ said Bill why oars are made to overlap. The captain, mean- time, tinkered at the motor. Suddenly it started with a roar that showed a dirty disposition. I burst into song: “Yoho! Yo ho! for a sailor’s life, For the wave and the driving wind!” *“What’s that?”’ asked Beezer. ‘Tm making it up as I go along,” I answered. ‘“‘The next lines will be harder, when I need a rhyme.”’ “Just so,” said Bill. | But our troubles were not ended. We had not advanced more than three miles when the engine died104 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY again. Nor could it be persuaded into further action. So the captain took the oars. He pulled with a fisher- man’s strong stroke and he knew each turn of the nar- row winding stream without glancing across his shoulder. ‘What happened to your wife’s arm?” asked Bill. “Broke in two places! Puttin’ up curtains as weren’t worth much anyhow! Had it set in Tonbridge! Three puns first and last was what it cost. She’s worth it. I'd do a lot more’n that for her.”’ In an hour we had come to a bridge that carried a road to Rye, which was here four miles distant. And here we landed. At the edge of the marsh there was a village with an inn, and to it all four of us walked to cool the captain’s thirst. Thrice he thrust his face into three pints of beer. Thrice he wiped his mouth. Thrice he grunted with content. He capped the feast with a hunk of fruit cake. Then, without complaint at the twelve miles of exercise that awaited him, he thanked us for the beer, the cake and tip, wished us success upon our travels and with waving hand set off briskly to the river. It was supper time when we passed through the Land Gate and entered Rye. Bill had bought post cards of ruined Bodiam, so he sent one to America. ‘‘This is our inn,” he wrote, “‘a quaint old hostelry—a little broken and a leaky roof. I have marked our rooms.’ At which he put a loop around a battlement. ‘‘This is Charles’s apartment.”’ Another battlement for Beezer. And then at a lonely window near the top where wind swept through, ““My attic.”THE CRUISE OF THE FORGET-ME-NOT 105 ‘““Can we drink the water?”’ I asked the waiter at supper, “the water from the tap?” He shrugged his shoulders. ‘“‘Some does. Some 7 r{ J i eee teem My attic doesn’t,” he said. “There ain’t no reason, if I may say so, why one shouldn’t, if he likes it.”Jfeern mcay ees oo a Rye—now cut from the ocean by a wide stretch of sand CHAPTER X PAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A HURRIED READER HE English Channel in these last three hundred years has shifted its coast line by many miles, and most inconsistently. Rye, a seaport in the middle ages, is now cut from the ocean by a wide stretch of sand; whereas Winchelsea, its ancient neighbor— the parent of the present town—once likewise on the coast, is now buried beneath the water and fishing crait sail above its chimneys. It is perplexing how the ocean could have played such opposite tricks upon towns so close, and each trick so destructive. And yet generally hereabouts the ocean has retreated. What were once harbors for herring boats are now a watery fen, and former fens are mostly dried to grazing land. ‘The Isle of Oxney, four miles north of Rye across the marshes of the Rother, where yesterday we lay marooned, is still an island in the narrow letter of its definition because of a military canal and drainage 106PAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A READER 107 ditches; but it is ridiculously washed about with meadows more or less dry and is even without a distant view of broad water. But once these flats were open channels from the ocean and one might have sailed north from Rye up their shallow courses, steered around the island on a rising tide and dropped a cargo of illicit rum at Tenterden, ten miles inland. And all of this lower country shows that it was but lately rescued from the sea; for, like a swooning lady, it is clad in a drip- ping garment of watery meadows. A newer Winchelsea was built back safe from the ocean on a hill to replace the older town, and now in its turn the newer town grows old. Rye gazes at the sea across its stretch of sand and dreams of braver days. For all of these seaports were rich in commerce until the shifting coast blocked them from their living. Even in Roman times, when they were only obscure fishing villages, they were more or less concerned with the policing of the Channel. In Saxon days they put to sea against the Dane, although it was a vain at- tempt, and then in turn they served him when he had come to power. From the earliest times it was rec- ognized that this southeast coast lay nearest to foreign enemies and the defense of England depended on the channel towns. But it was William the Conqueror who built a system of protection, who banded their ports in compact and levied men and ships against them. So long as Norman and Angevin influence was strong in France as well as England the Channel was _ little more than a domestic lake, but with the closing of the twelfth century Saxon and Norman had been108 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY welded into peaceful English living and France was their common enemy. The thirteenth century brought a need of ships for war that fetched the Cinque Ports into power and prestige. There were seven of the Five Ports—Hastings, Winchelsea, Rye, Dover, Hythe, Sandwich and Rom- ney—and on them during the next four hundred years fell the duty of protecting England against invasion. During all that time there was no royal navy, as we would understand the word, but the seven ports sup- plied the King with a varying quota of ships as the prosperity and changing fortune of each permitted. It was an extempore fleet of fishing boats and coastal vessels at an average of twenty or thirty tons—one- masted boats with high prow and stern, manned by twenty men (boats which presently on the signing of a foreign truce would sail again for herring)—; and the charter of the towns provided that they must serve the King as he might direct fifteen days each year without pay, but that compensation be given for service beyond that number of days. If the King planned an expedi- tion against France, if reprisals were needed on the sea to restore the nation’s honor, it was these ports of Kent and Sussex which supplied the ships and sailors. We hear of their expeditions against the Scotch. With their aid Wales is conquered and a bridge of boats 1s thrown across the Menai Straits. They blockaded French ports and took the mounseer’s loot from vessels on the sea. If a royal princess must be fetched or an ambassador set down abroad it was a fishing boat from one of these towns that was summoned for the task.PAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A READER 109 In return for such services as these the Cinque Ports were loaded with titles and distinction. They were declared free towns and given special privileges. Each freeman, whether of birth or election, might style him- self a baron and walk among the sailors of London or Kast Anglia with proud uplifted nose. Literally he was but a fraction of a baron; for a single title had to serve the entire baronage and be divided among the freemen, but Yarmouth dared not sneer. Ships that passed the Five Ports were required to dip their colors. These towns owed no obedience to the jurisdiction of the shire, for they answered only to the Warden of the Channel who was a King’s officer. They were exempt from out- side tax and were free to trade in any English market. “They are to be quit,” so runs an ancient charter, “on both sides of the sea throughout our whole land of tallage, passage, carriage, rivage, spondage, wreck, re-setting and all customs.” And even if the reading of these exemptions brings to light that we do not know what some of the hard words mean (and Webster is almost as ignorant, for I have tried him), still we can guess that mighty privileges were conferred on the Cinque Ports for their guard upon the coast. It must not be thought that England during these centuries was supreme upon the sea or that she dreamed of wide conquest to the corners of the map. It was not until the days of Elizabeth that England came to power, and before her time it was Spain, Portugal and Genoa from whose harbors there sailed the mightiest ships of war and commerce. In comparison to these more stirring ports the channel towns were engaged only in110 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY trivial business that did but alternate between war and herring. For if the southeast ports of England were her earliest defense the later and more glorious honors were with Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. It was from the western harbors that ships sailed forth in exploration that revealed the world. From the west English pirates sailed to attack Spanish galleons and colonies, and practiced a seamanship that was finally to defeat the Armada. And long before this time the southeast ports had grown too shallow for the heavier vessels that had come to use. For with wider sailing and with guns to replace the bow and arrow, larger ships were needed. Some of the older ports, like Rye, were already choked with sand by the shifting current of the Channel. Rye stands on a great rock above the sand, with houses crowding up the slope and a church tower at the top that makes the town look as if it had been whittled toa point. Three lazy rivers meet below the rock and dawdle in a single sluggish channel to the sea. There is a golf course now upon the sand. Rye is a town where the streets rise so steep that a pedestrian upon the hill is always short of breath and nothing on wheels can get to the top at all, where houses have leaded windows on the sidewalk with glimpses inside of pewter and brass candlesticks, of generous fireplaces and the smoky beams of ancient hospitality. Often there is a step or so down to their front doors, as if in curiosity the street had acquired the habit of standing up on tiptoe with nose pressed against the glass for a better view of these friendly rooms.PAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A READER iif It is a crowded town. No house is large. They sit close, with cramped elbows against their neighbors. No street 1s wider than the necessity of a lazy traffic. The sidewalk of the high street may hold two persons side by side, but on lesser streets if two companions walk to- gether one of them must straddle the gutter or go behind. Rye is a town where one expects to see old ladies in lace caps taking their tea at four o’clock, with a tawny cat yawning on a cushion in the sun. The making of lace jabots and crazy quilts must still be in fashion here. Perhaps white stockings are yet in favor, because the old queen wore them years ago. Any chance pedestrian will be bent with rheumatism if a native, or if he be a stranger it is likely that he will carry an easel and a stool and be looking for a half-timbered front to sketch. It is a town where streets are called Watchbell Street and ‘Traders’ Lane, where any warehouse looks as if it might be the lodging of a grandmother without a worldly purpose, so divorced it seems from business. single ladies of withered circumstance clutter up a parlor with blue china and crockery cats, and suspend a placard of antiques inside the window as a bait for strangers. Authors engage a room to write a master- piece. Painters punch a window to the north for steady light. Tired folk still in trade wish that they might live here in an ancient house and let the eight- twenty and Watling Street go hang. And they say that house-agents at Rye lead all day a string of these discontented strangers about from door to door. Henry James and Arthur Benson had houses at Rye.112 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY ~~ A hundred artists and authors live about the square at the top of the town, and doubtless other master- pieces are under way. ‘There is an esplanade below the castle walls where one may walk in full view of the TEASE) feta recuwveFtl aye Watchbell Street ocean, and another terrace to the southwest with Winchelsea and Camber in the distance. On the first of these I sat for an hour in the sun; but to the latter I came at twilight, and I left at once for I had broken on the privacy of lovers. It was my embarrassmentPAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A READER 1138 rather than theirs; for each face shut out entirely the other’s view, and cheek to cheek they were alone. There is a church to be seen at Rye, and an old gate, and a castle with its ancient threat toward France. But no sight is quite so interesting as our own hotel, the Mermaid Inn. This was built almost five hundred years ago and served as an inn until the latter part of the eighteenth century. About thirty years back it was restored to hotel use, and each season its owners pull down a ceiling of modern plaster and lay bare the black timbering of ships which served the King in wars with France when cannon were a novelty. Most of the plaster is now removed, but there are several rooms with surface unexplored. Nor is it certain that closets and steps may not be still concealed in some unnoticed thickness of the wall. For it is a building of unexpected stairways, of change of level that skulks for mischief in the shadows, of corridors kinked with indecision. One must enter a doorway with a stoop. The beams reach down to crack the head. One stairway, at least, is of narrow pie-shaped steps cut thin for indigestion, and it winds upward so steeply that one climbs with his hand on the tread in front. There is a place of hiding above the lounge hearth. Tradition has it that barrels of smuggled rum were stored here, but another legend says that Jesuit priests lay in concealment to escape the scaffold. There is a sunny corner room with leaded windows deeply furred where Queen Elizabeth slept, and from it a secret stair- case climbs inside the wall about the fireplace to issue to an upper closet where a well dropped to a tunnel that114 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY extended beneath the town. And about this, too, there were tales of smuggling. For if Rye spent its brave youth sending ships on the King’s business, its shrewd maturity was given to the fetching of rum from France and avoiding the King’s officers. Smuggling seems to have been a chief indus- try all along the coast, nor did one of this profession ap- pear to sacrifice dignity or social station. Roustabouts, it is true, rolled the dirty kegs upon the beach, but the captain waxed his mustachios and took snuff from a silver box. If caught he would be hanged, a blot on a fastidious escutcheon to be sure, but the profits were big and the adventure tempting. Dead, the village made a song of him and wove legends around his romantic life. Perhaps in America a next generation will see our own brave rum-runners in the diamond circle of the opera. Or nursery tunes will be composed of hair- breadth danger on the cloudy Jersey coast. It was on a dark December night When Ike the Jew and Nigger Jim Went sailing out without a light To fetch the precious bottles in. Preachers, merchants and other leading citizens seem always to have aided the smugglers in any brush with the excisemen. ‘There is a story that one of these preachers was knocked up at night by a neighbor whose load of rum was hard pressed by officers. He opened the village church and the two rolled in the tubs and hid them in the pews. Next day was Sunday so he took to bed, having first nailed a notice on the door that he was nigh to deathPAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A READER 115 and that the usual service would be omitted. Our own church is yet too prim for this display of mercy. Smugglers were of two trades—sailors who fetched the kegs from France and the runners who received them on the beach and bore them up to London. Both trades had their dangers, and yet the risk upon the sea was slight against the other. A ship can hide its lantern and be swallowed in the night. The pounding of waves, a fog, a cloudy sky, are its protection. Even if dis- covered it can lift a sail and run to France for shelter. But a land smuggler invites suspicion by waiting with his carts upon the shore. He must show his light for signal and reveal himself to enemies. He must roll the tubs up above the tide—a noisy business if the night be quiet—, he must put them into hiding. There may be no pounding waves to drown his sounds of labor, no wide spaces to guard him from surprise. His wagons are a sullen target in the dark. Every village through which he passes must hear the creaking of his wheels, and any nose pressed on a window will guess the cargo that he carries. Safety depends on connivance in his crime. Kipling’s Smugglers’ Song preserves the atti- tude of this countryside through which the rum was brought at night. If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet, Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street, Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie. Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by. Five and twenty ponies Trotting through the dark;ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk; Laces for a lady; letters for a spy, And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by. This is, of course, better than the ballad of Nigger Jim; but we are still a young country, without the old world’s touch of culture. On every road upward from the coast there were friendly houses where rum could be hidden through the day. Holes were dug in a corner of a garden with brush to cover. Perhaps an extra cellar opened froma secret trap in the planking of a floor. Or the boarding of a kitchen ceiling could be pulled aside to expose an unexpected attic beneath the roof, with a hoist for lifting kegs. Some of these houses spread a rumor that they were haunted, but it was merely to lay suspicion when lights were seen at night or any noise was heard of tubs unloaded. Here at the Mermaid is a hiding-place for rum. We shall see an attic for the same purpose at Pevensey. There is a secret storeroom at the inn at Lewes. These are instances at random. Land smugglers of easy purse were once the best patrons of these southern inns and all things must have been done to insure the safety of their journey north. It was the bookkeeper who took us around the Mermaid and pointed out the sights. She was an attractive youngster, unspoiled as yet by devotion to her ledger; and all four of us went upstairs and downPAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A READER 117 to every unoccupied room and tapped on suspicious walls to find an undiscovered passage. Bill, of course, knocked his head on many beams and stumbled on hidden steps. I would hear a thud and “‘Oh, my soul!” He was, however, so taken with the inn despite his wounds, that he plans to return to Rye when old age shall creep upon him and engage Queen Elizabeth’s room in which to end his days. Nor does the Mermaid rely too entirely on its beauty and ancient use. The food and service were excellent, and the beds moder- ately flat. We went to the pictures in the evening—as the Eng- lish say—, a movie of Alaska. All of these movies that infest England are of American manufacture. They are played by American actors—that is, by Jews— and the scenery is ours. The factories of Hollywood, even if their employees give too much time to night- life, have now reached a production that is ample for the world. I cannot say much for the merit of the output, but it is a strange thing that British children should grow so familiar with our New York buildings, with Pullman sleeping cars, the Rockies, cowboys, Trust presidents of heavy jaw and our waving fields of grain. It is safe to say that a child of Devon or the north knows less of London than he does of San Fran- cisco. I am told that children even of Siam have more intimacy with New York than with—than with what- ever towns they have out there. The gifted actress who performed at Rye was our phenomenon, Baby Peggy, and she acted with such skill as I anticipated. : Nor is it alone the American movie that invigorates118 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY the eastern world. I understand that our Jazz carries also a message to jaded Europe, that our saxophone goes on a brilliant tour all around the world. These things threaten the bathtub for supremacy, so long our pinnacle of culture. A traveler becomes proud of his national accomplishment when he hears our precious tunes everywhere abroad. Let him sit at Como and a tinkling rhythm for happy tourists hits his ear. If he seek a hotel buried in the mountains where ruined castles rise, a disk of jazz is there before him to soil the night. It was Bananas two years ago, the Back Porch last year, and this year it has been Tea for Two and that other little gem, I Want to be Happy. Before this book can hurry to the press there will be another masterpiece ready for the summer— Thanks for the Buggy Ride,” perhaps. But I shall be true to my first affection and rank Bananas at the top, as I heard it once sung by four colored gentlemen in a blaze of gin at a dance hall on Montmartre. It is to an American tune that men grow drunk all round the world. We had bought a paper sack of cherries to reinforce the show. I told Beezer not to scatter the stones about, but to put them in his pocket. He bettered my in- struction by dropping them in Bill’s. ~My sainted grandmother,” Bill exclaimed, “what have we here?” when he thrust his fingers into the sticky mass. Two Englishmen sat in front of us and, presently, tiring of Baby Peggy’s silly antics, they turned a shoul- der on the play and talked with us. Like ourselves, they were walking through the country and had comePAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A READER 119 up that day from Hastings. The elder of these was a University man—of the upper middle class, as he ex- plained—, engaged in the mining or manufacture (whichever is correct) of nitrates in Peru, a job which had taken him several times around the world. He was a bit of a John Bull, accustomed to pushing things brusquely from in front of him; and although he was friendly to America and cordial to ourselves he had the air of engaging us in battle. We were to him undoubt- edly a green product, of strange, flat and nasal speech— talking his own language, it is true, but as one might expect to hear it on some forgotten island of the sea. “How were you so quick to know that we are foreigners?”’ I asked. “Twang!” he answered. ‘And then you pronounce some words incorrectly.” What words?” ‘Come, I say, that isn’t fair. Well, patent instead of patent. Invalid and not invaléed. Eether instead of elther.”’ ‘Patent is correct enough in America.”’ ‘But it isn’t English.” “Who says so?” I asked. “Just because the language started in your little island you have no monopoly of authority. One is more usual with us and the other with you. Sometimes when a word travels it changes its pronunciation, and good usage there makes it right.” ‘It 1s pronounced better here.”’ Very likely. But how about your Norman English? Didn’t you alter the French to suit your tongue? It120 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY was wrong at first until time made it right. It’s beef not beuf, mutton not mouton. No nation has so garbled foreign words. Right here in Rye Ypres Castle is called Wipers. And in Rye Wipers is correct. Pitent is our Wipers.” ~ But America thinks she talks English. We know we don’t talk French.”’ “Call it what you will! If America had arisen before the days of easy travel, we would gradually have acquired a language of our own. The difference is slight because of frequent steamboats. In general now we follow your lead.”’ Why?” ' Because your culture is the better. If ever you lose your supremacy in that to us, it will be our stand- ards that have the greater force... Whichever nation produces the Shakespeares and Miltons of the future will have the higher authority. But if that time ever comes, your insular patter will be right—for you. And patent is now right for us.” Our acquaintance observed that the future of the world depended on the friendship between Britain and ourselves, but he added frankly that he did not like us. We were so swanky. * What’s that?” I asked. ~ You brag so much of your motor cars, your hotels, your wealth and all that.”’ He turned to his com- panion. “My friend and I” he added, “stayed away from the Mermaid because we wished to escape Amer- icans. Amuricans, you say it. Amuricans! I suppose that is right, too,”PAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A READER 121 ‘““My friends and I” I answered, “are, of course, illiterate. Our better people say Americans. You avoided Amuricans at the Mermaid. And then you met some of them in a movie.’ I laughed. ‘In a cinema,”’ he corrected. “And whenever you have seen enough of this horrid picture (My God, you send us beastly pictures!)—-when you have seen enough let’s go over to my hotel and have a drink!” We assented. “Your cinemas”’ he persisted, “‘make us trouble in the Orient. They teach the natives unnecessarily what cheats and liars we are—you are, that is, but the na- tives mix us up. They used to look on the English as persons superior to themselves, persons whose orders must be obeyed; but the pictures tell them that we are swine, and little by little they are coming to believe it. I am serious. The American cinema is bad enough at Rye, but here it only bores you and you may stay away. In the Orient it creates unrest and puts the English rule in jeopardy.” ‘Revolution in India.”’ I laughed. ‘The police are seeking Baby Peggy. A bit silly, isn’t it?” ‘In far-off towns” he continued, “‘there may be but a handful of white persons living among ten thousand natives—yellow, black or brown. And these few per- sons are Just as safe as a lion-tamer in his cage. The lions would like to eat him, but they do not dare. There is something of authority in his eye, and a sharp stick in his hand. And the British women! Sex unrestraint is as usual in much of the Orient as it was in the days when the Arabian Nights was written, And the >122 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBUBY colored race seeks the white. The protection of white women rests on the belief that British women are sacred, that a native who violates one of them must die for it. Whether it is by her consent is no matter. This tradition has been built up through a century or so. Without it, no white woman would be safe in many of the outlying stations of the Empire. And then a cinema from Hollywood comes to town. God! Mack Sennet’s Bathing Beauties! So these are the sacred women of the west—these girls who caper naked and are pawed and mauled. It’s a dirty business and white women pay for its profits.” We walked through the silent streets of Rye, snarling pleasantly at one another. He did not like the French. No honesty! They would not pay their debts, would not even try to pay them. England, by God, he said, would pay hers. If America would make a stand against Germany, Italy and France, she would do better than pecking at England. And yet, despite his brusqueness, I liked him. Bill was less tolerant. He kept nudging at me to land him one. A local law forbade the Englishman’s hotel from serving liquor to those who were not staying in the house, so we were given ginger beer while our hosts took Scotch. They accepted it with but a slight mur- mur of regret and with a lack of resourcefulness toward a remedy that seemed apparent. And then all five of us went to the Mermaid, which seemed in happy ignorance of the law. For an hour we sat in the oak-timbered back parlor and told one another of our national defects and per-PAGES TO BE SKIPPED BY A READER 123 versities. He accused us of a flat and open A, and of an R that was burred like a file. So we asked him why he pronounced raspberries as if it were spelled rawsbriz, with a sustenuto on the raw. He told us that we spoke an E as if it were a U. Library, we retorted, not labri. He charged us with excessive slang, but failed to catch us. He insisted that we were now speaking guardedly against a slip. And of the general instances that he gave, many of them are used in America only in the gutter. It would be as unjust, we urged, to charge an English gentleman with a cockney H. Cheerio, we hurled back, old thing! “Why do you wear straw hats and horn-rimmed glasses?”’ he asked. ‘‘ Because we prefer them to monocles and spats,” we answered. He countered this by calling us a nation of wartime profiteers, a people who bought its culture from abroad. At times it was almost a stormy evening, and once or twice negotiations nearly cracked. But all of us felt the better to air our spleen. And, although some of the truths were unpalatable, the drink was excellent. He was rather an engaging fellow and we sat until the hour was late. He gave us his card and asked us to look him up in London. Nor did the bookkeeper com- plain, although we had kept her up till one o’clock to lock the door.KCLD » : \ mmr on oH . y | = OEERTRC f ag Hf 4s Za = 9) Val AE eS vS S ae ee / | | i Su (* Cee | ' Landgate at Rye CHAPTER XI CONTAINING A BURST OF SONG OR a day we walked about the narrow streets of Rye. Grass grows in the cobbles, but this is said by bustling rival towns to be planted to stress an accent on the town’s unworldliness. We climbed the Traders’ Lane where certainly artists live at the high windows that look upon the sea. A door or so is painted blue and there are open skylights for the escape of bursting passion. There is, moreover, a delightful, rickety aspect of disorder—an outside stairway like a flying buttress across a lower roof, landings where genius can get its breath, areas where talent sweats in a basement for a penny—a touch of something that is foreign and smacks of Italy. 124CONTAINING A BURST OF SONG 125 We rambled along the moldy fronts of Watchbell Street and I retain the memory of one house older than its fellows that sets up a claim it was once part of a convent building. ‘Three steps lead downward to a hollow sill that is worn by sandaled feet, for the cen- turies have laid a thick coating on the street. Each wind drops a tiny burden until the deposit lifts the level of an ancient town. For Time is of Christian ritual, and it buries our human generations in its dust. We poked up a narrow lane on a hint that John Fletcher had been born in a house somewhere at the top. ‘**And where is Beaumont?” asked Bill. “I always thought that he was Fletcher’s twin.” But of him no mention. The building showed at the rear a decayed Tudor front, as it were; but the lane was too cramped for a view of it. Below the leaded windows there was a wretched little yard where a yellow dog nosed among the ash cans. We stood for a minute with heads thrown back at a painful paralytic angle, then checked the house as something seen. We lounged about the church square, which is as snug a spot of quiet retirement as one could find in England. This, I fancy, is the abode of authors; and books, no doubt, of a dreamy sort are here still written with a quill. They say that once a pawnbroker hung his triple symbol at one of these doors. Did he think to catch a profit in the poverty arising from a rejected manuscript, or from a watch hung up until the day of royalty? Had the fellow no feeling of his business that he pushed his way among his victims? But the harsh126 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY suggestion of his sign so lost its meaning in the peace- ful street that slim authors out of purse thought it but a decoration divorced from their necessity. Of a con- sequence trade fell off until he was forced to remove his shop and set it for dirtier money among the sailors on the wharves. We peered into windows wherever householders were good enough to leave their curtains up. And were I mayor of Rye, in recognition that these old rooms are properly the museum of the town, I would refund the tax to such persons as show their treasures thus without a fee to strangers. We attended an exhibition of resident artists, held in a barnlike room that had once been Henry James’s study. We sat on the terrace above the sands and thought how this expanse was once a harbor dotted with fishing craft which was accustomed, on the bidding of the King, to lift their anchors and sail against his enemies. And then I lay down at the Mermaid for a nap, and listened to two fellows with a guitar and rough sour voices out of tune who sang in the street below on the chance of pennies. The intention of their serenade was Italian, but a northern fog quite filled the air. The song was about someone in the pangs of unre- quited love who kept repeating mournfully in the chorus “I’m dreamin’ by the stream, of you, sweet Nellie Deane,” which he appeared to think a satisfac- tory rhyme to move the young lady’s heart. By good fortune I was able to drop a handful of pennies which grazed his nose, and love’s lament was suspended in the scramble.CONTAINING A BURST OF SONG 127 Bill and Beezer, meantime, were absent at a fair and concert given for charity in the fields below the town, but they reported nothing for my notes except that the booths were served by young ladies in quaint Sel 1Q ET CUE ra The intention of their serenade was Italian old costume. There was a Maypole dance performed not as with us by children, but by adults. Also ginger beer, warm and stale. After we had paid our bill we sat with the lady- manager and her enthusiastic bookkeeper in their private office while all of us smoked cigarettes, and I128 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY promised them that I would make a record in my book that the Mermaid topped all the hotels upon our travels. And so it did. The timbered ceilings, leaded windows, its great fireplace in the smoking room, the rambling corridors, the courtyard with its basin of tinkling water, were of pleasant invitation—and added to these attractions there was the wish to please a patron, a courtesy unspoiled. Our hostess sat in easy comfort with her feet stretched across an extra chair, flicking her ashes toward the hearth. And so to bed, well pleased with Rye—its busy past and the present life upon the streets. On the following morning, Wednesday the twenty- second of July, I arose for an early breakfast when the inn still blinked with sleep and last night’s crumbs were on the cloth. And so I took to the road alone— twelve miles to Hastings—, for Bill and Beezer had elected to sleep late and loll across by char-a-banc like pampered tourists. And sometimes for contrast it is well to walk alone. For, if the start be when the hour is fresh, some exultant thought may meet you at a crossroad and fall as a comrade into step. If dew is still upon the grass it is of shrewd persuasion to the brain to reflect the sparkle. Or any bird may pitch the key for random reverie. In an early hour of summer it is of the essence to walk alone and let the fancy scamper as it will. An open road is so secure against intrusion. A stretch of lonely miles holds a leisure that induces meditation and you are released to a land without a barrier. The tap of your footstep, if the stride be deliberate and long, 1sCONTAINING A BURST OF SONG 129 rhythm for quiet utterance. Then, if ever, the brain is host to a company of thought too shy to gather in a noisy hour. Hazlitt, in one of his essays, has noted this. “I cannot see the wit” he writes, “of walking and talking at the same time.”’ And he adds, “‘Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths.”’ There was a touch of perversity in Hazlitt, I confess,— a mood now and then of quarrel that made him an uncertain comrade—-;; yet this essay is of such a gracious fabric, so packed with wholesome meditation, so apt of phrase to common thought, that no man if he plans to walk alone should make his start without glancing at its page. “I like solitude,’ he continues, “when I give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for . ‘a friend in my retreat, Whom I may whisper solitude is sweet. 239 For ordinary opinion we may set Sterne against him. ‘*Let me have a companion of my way, were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.” But now and then in contrast it is well to heed the advice of Hazlitt and to walk alone. For if three men go together there comes an hour when one or another of them will prattle too many words and break the sounds of country life that are a proper background for a silence. Thought can seldom find a sentence to ex-130 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY press its meaning. It is of gossamer texture whose slender thread is torn in the handling of a conversation. And so all morning I tramped alone in joyful mood. But, although I recall this jubilation on the road from Rye, I cannot find any touch of wisdom in my notes. It had perished like the song of birds across the mead- ows, like the wind that blew from off the ocean with its rumor of buried Winchelsea. There are, indeed, certain scratchings of rhyme that indicate I tried my hand at making melancholy verses; for it is in such high moods that one runs joyfully to sadness. Youth writes tragedy because it is untouched by care and ignorant of pain, because life is so vivid at its dawn that death is but a pleasant ghost of dreams. This morning I was of an equal age with Peter Pan. And so I wrote: Where flies the light when the candle’s out? And where lies love that is dead? For one recalls and the other forgets The word and the hour that has fled. And the one who holds the hour in thought— The word that has sped so fast— Must bury it deep beyond the light And hide it in the past. Where flies the light when the candle’s out And shadows lie thick on the heart? And oh, my dear, you have gone away, And a lonely hour is dark. Evidently, however,—for I have searched my note- book—my genius spent itself at this point, for my scratchings went no farther. And I have often won-CONTAINING A BURST OF SONG 131 dered if poets address their verses always to a real woman. For in practice, as here on the Hastings road, they must sometime in extremity conjure up a lady out of nothing to fit their wares. And now, at home among my books, my measures seem to resemble other and better verses of a better poet. ‘When the lamp is shattered the light in the dust lies dead.”’ Plagiarism surely cannot be judged a mortal sin when one advances so blithely and _ so innocently to the theft. So with rhymes and happy sadness I beguiled the lowland that lies along the ocean and climbed at last a hill to a stone gate-tower that guards the approach to Winchelsea. Winchelsea, although it lies broadly in the sun, has yet an air of melancholy, as if it still wore a black ribbon on its arm for its parent buried in the sea. This calamity befell the older city in the year twelve hundred and fifty. ‘On the first day of October,” Holinshed writes, “the moon, upon her change, ap- pearing red and swelled, began to show tokens of the great tempest of wind that followed, which was so huge and mightie, both by land and sea, that the like had not been lightlie knowne, and seldome, or rather never heard of by men then alive. The sea forced contrarie to his natural course, flowed twice without ebbing, yeelding such a rooring that the same was heard (not without great woonder) a farre distance from the shore. Moreover, the same sea appeared in the darke of the night to burne, as it had been on fire, and the waves to strive and fight togither after a marvellous sort, so that the mariners could not devise132 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY how to save their ships where they laie at anchor, by no cunning or shift which they could devise.” Nor was Winchelsea alone destroyed. It is said that the salt spray was thrown in the tempest so far inland ~ that the next year’s crops declined to grow, nor would the leaves of the trees and hedges put forth their full foliage.’ Unlike Rye, the streets of Winchelsea are broad with much space for trees to arch above. The houses are not huddled with a neighbor’s elbow in the ribs, but everywhere there is room for gardens. If Rye is crowded with houses that stand a tiptoe for the view, Winchelsea is of generous dimension, for the hill on which it stands is more than ample for its accommoda- tion. Both of these towns took their rise from com- merce and were of a burgher population of free priv- lege, unlike such places as Arundel which sprang from feudal circumstance under the eye of an aristocratic castle. Rye is still a busy market town with its rem- nant of wharves and shallow shipping on the river, but Winchelsea sits marooned upon its wooded upland and its thought turns entirely to the past. In the church that sets in its acre of softest turf there is a tomb of Gervase Alard who was Admiral of the Cinque Ports and a sailor of great repute in ancient battles. Ellen Terry owns a cottage at Winchelsea and spends her summers here. I noticed a placard announcing that she was to recite at a garden féte for charity. And it happened that a friend of mine, coming here later, heard her and had the pleasure of paying his respects to this actress whose genius overtopped Henry Irving inCONTAINING A BURST OF SONG 133 so many plays. Her eyes fail, he says, and she had difficulty in reading from a manuscript. Thackeray lived once in a house alongside the grave- yard and wrote Denis Duval here. Under a large tree in this same graveyard John Wesley preached his last sermon. A broad avenue leads around the church, and this I followed with a glance across my shoulder at the build- ing’s beauty. The branches arched overhead, to re- mind travelers that Gothic took its start with nature. There is a sharp descent at the edge of town and for two hours I walked on a low ridge between the ocean and the marshes of the river Brede. In front of me lay the purple wall of the Downs, which plunges at Hast- ings to the sea to rise again in France in a similar ridge of chalk. And now my happy songs were quite forgotten in fatigue and I lay wagers with myself whether motors with an even number of passengers would exceed those with an uneven number—for this is a roadside cribbage for pedestrians who go alone when the brain grows dull. As the morning wore on a rising traffic thickened up my count. And now a stone tower, that had signaled to me in the early morning and had been lost awhile, popped up beside me on a hill; for at last I had spanned the low- land by the sea. At the town of Ore I was well up on the Downs, and from here to Hastings I walked through a broken two miles of scattered and unpleasing houses, with ginger beer for refreshment at a tavern by the road. A shabby street of boarding houses and cheap shops134 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY plunged down the hill, and I was on the beach. A thousand awkward legs were taking the air in nature’s raiment, and five thousand toes were buried in the sand. I had walked the twelve miles in less than three hours and I sat down hard at a corner restaurant where tables were exposed upon the curb. ~ Waitress,” I bawled, “fetch me quick a pint of stout!”Few ships today are lost upon the sandy British coast CHAPTER XII TEN THOUSAND LEGS ABOVE THE SEA (= bodies shrink upon a mountain and yet on any lofty peak there comes an increase to the stature of our souls. Our minds here reach out beyond their usual grasp and run to the edge of nature; and Orion, despite its vastness, finds a lodging in the cabin of the eye. For, although we are a speck unnoticed, too small to be measured against the sky, yet we are endowed with an inheritance that builds castles in the twilight of a fancy, that finds beauty and a reason in the sun, the clouds and wind, the shifting color of the earth; that threads a pathway across a field of stars and knocks for answer on the black and sightless wall that bounds the universe. It has been written that we lift up our voice unto the hills whence comes our help, and here aloft in humility of spirit we stand at God’s communion. A prospect from a head- 135136 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY land upon troubled water has this gift, also, for us, although in slighter measure, or a storm at sea with green waves that break to white. But whereas mountains always lift us to majestic thought where we humbly worship a God that is beyond our logic, the sea as we behold it from a beach lowers our aspiration by its condescending and familiar aspect. It stretches a smooth surface to the shore and asks us to be its equal. It tosses up a laughing ripple to the sand and bids us share its idle game. But we are the creatures of nature and not its equal; and all of our vast invention, though it seeks to make us master, is but evidence that proves our littleness. And so, when the sea takes us for a comrade, our souls sink again to pettiness in the losing of their Maker. This is all quite absurd. yet I have observed that nowhere do men and women show such crudity as on a beach. It is not entirely that their scanty dress reveals their starkness and deformity. Nor is it wholly that a holiday betrays how barren are their brains when free of accustomed business. Yet if a man goes without his tailor and the dull routine of his week, half of our civilization seems swept away. Nor can I be persuaded, from my knowledge of the present beach, that any siren of antiquity, unbrushed and dripping from the water. really charmed a sailor to destruction. In beauty there is required a touch of art. No lady can subdue a heart when her hair hangs wet in strings. Few ships today are lost upon the sandy British coast. Any creature on the shore at Hastings, if led by him-TEN THOUSAND LEGS ABOVE THE SEA 137 self apart and given pants or skirt as fit the sex, would doubtless show a spark of vivid inner life; but when ten thousand sprawl together with outstretched legs they are but the final sorting of a discard. And Amer- ica should not take comfort, for our watering places of popular resort are almost as bad. But Englishmen of the tripper class lack teeth or are possessed of yellow fangs. They are leathery and wrinkled even in their youth, as if thriftless nature wove their skins too big. On them the mighty Tailor laid no tape. Their joints are stiff and knotted with damp living. Their women are of scrawny figure, and their faces—let’s be frank—often their faces resemble those of horses. Their bathing costumes do not fit and the shabby cloth that hangs so loosely on the job appears to apologize for the raw material that is stuffed inside. Nor do these bathers seem to enjoy their sport. There is little laughter or merriment. Voices are not lifted in a jest or song. Races are not run upon the beach or water splashed. Small groups sit about in dismal toothless circles, as if a holiday came but once a year and its use were quite forgotten in the interval. Men and women, it is true, make love openly, cheek to cheek; but their stifling rapture drives away all trace of thought, and they sit hand in hand with stupid faces, without a word to be shared between them, alone among the crowd. If love be violent, he is moved to muss her hair, and she accepts his passion by stuffing sand inside his shirt. Hastings, alas, is not the magic. casement of the poet that opens on the foam. Is it any wonder, when the bathing hour is done, that138 ROUNDABOUT TO CAN TERBURY — the disgusted tide runs out? Surely the moon, its guide In any ordinary ebbing,—surely the moon, which has winked for a thousand years upon a stolen kiss, has had no hand in such a sordid love or fetches here the water in or out. [If it snapped its fingers at its usual task and went off on more profitable business at Deau- ville across the Channel. the ocean would be just as nimble to escape the clutter of these arms and legs. The Channel has a bad reputation for a testy temper, but I lay it to the crowd at Hastings. It is a porter who has swept all day at a dirty beach, then runs to the bar outside to make a drunken night of it. After I had stood on the beach in haughty isolation among the trippers and had composed with disjointed nose this apostrophe to pyorrhea and uric acid, I sought a table at the sidewalk, ordered a pint of stout and persuaded the waitress—a creature with slapping heels and a jaw that worked upon a wad of gum—to sop up from the table the remnant of a former feast. And here I stretched out my legs in as much comfort as was afforded by a spindling iron chair that held no compromise with the cushions of the body. For with softer persuasion patrons might sit too long and rob the shop of new customers. And here to me came Bill and Beezer to my great amazement. Rosy-fingered Morpheus, it seems had clambered from their beds shortly after I had departed from my breakfast, so they had caught an earlier bus than was intended. They had thought to overtake me on the road and they were in high admiration of my speed. Bill’s gullet roared for stout, so down they satTEN THOUSAND LEGS ABOVE THE SEA — 139 with me on spindling chairs and beckoned to Miss Wrigley for extra pints. “And where now?” said Bill, when he came up for breath. It had been our plan to eat lunch at Hastings and then walk six miles to Battle Abbey in the early after- noon with a glimpse of Senlac by the way where William defeated Harold. For I had been in Hastings before and I had hardened against the town as an abode for the night. Did not Charles Lamb once write an essay entitled “The Old Margate Hoy” wherein he told of a dismal holiday on this very beach? ‘“‘We have been dull at Worthing one summer,” he wrote, “‘duller at Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and are at this moment doing dreary penance at—Hastings!”’ Surely no landlady leaves a copy of Elia on her smoke-room shelves. A lukewarm guest whose inclination wavers toward the mountains or the city for a change might strike on such a paragraph as this: “I love town, or country;” cried Elia, “but this detestable Cinque Port is neither. . . . I cannot stand all day on the naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea, shifting like the colors of a dying mullet. I am tired of looking out at the windows of this island-prison. I would fain retire into the interior of my cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, over it, across it. . . . There is no sense of home at Hastings. It isa place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stockbrokers. .. . If it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have140 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY remained, a fair honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something. ...” And so “nature” he con- cludes, ““where she does not mean us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home.” I can fancy him in his sober suit of black, a clerk from India House, wandering listlessly upon the beach, homesick for the braver tide that flowed upward on the Strand when offices were shut. "And where now?” repeated Bill. emerging for the third time like Venus from the foam. Our plans for Battle Abbey were overthrown. Bill and Beezer, hounds with noses keen for the scent of music, had sniffed out a billboard announcing that on this very night there would be sung at Hastings “‘The Pirates of Penzance” by an all-star company direct from its London triumph before the King. And so in mercy I yielded to their excitement. ~ All companies in England” I said, “are just from a triumph before the King.” ~ Hasn’t the man anything else to do?” Bil] asked. Pretty soft,” said Beezer. “It means a free seat, of course.”’ “ Naturally,” I replied. ‘And one each side for a Duchess.”’ We thought the hostelries near by looked too thick with people. So we coasted down the plage under a frowning headland of great hotels and in half a mile we came to St. Leonards which is continuous to Hastings but is a suburb of quieter streets and a cleaner stretch of sand. It has an amusement pier of its own, but there are fewer slot machines, fortune tellers and penny showsTEN THOUSAND LEGS ABOVE THE SEA _ II upon it. Hastings is largely for the tripper, with a shuttle of London char-a-bances in and out; but St. Leon- ards, I fancy, draws a patronage that brings a trunk and pays for its lodging by the week—older folk, perhaps, who are stranded here when their city activity has ebbed. Nor had I guessed the dismal meaning which re- sides in that word strand. It is a town of widows whom Time consoles, and its shops must do a monstrous business in the sale of colored yarn and puppy biscuits. Our landlady at the Mermaid had recommended a hotel and we found it a pleasant house of clean decay that catered to ancient ladies with lorgnettes and respectable but outlandish turbans. “Took!” said Bill, as we entered. “That old lady’s hat was bought for the coronation of the old Queen. It was then at the top of fashion.” And it was at lunch that he invented Mrs. Dycon. He had worked so long with Pomfret-Dawken that it was for variety he added a running-mate. ‘““She and Pomfret” he began, “‘were friends just so- so, and both of them were in attendance on Queen Victoria at Balmoral. There was always a bit of Jeal- ousy which of them would hand out stockings to the old lady. Dycon, cried the Queen, fetch me in my old rose. I’m off to church. And so I am afraid,’ continued Bill, “that Pomfret became a bit snooty, as we say.” Here at St. Leonards, by good luck at the table next to ours, we saw Pomfret and Dycon at their lunch. They were eating in that respectable method of mastica-. tion that is common among English dowagers of the gentler sort—a slight rotary movement of the lips and142 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY then a little gulp that drops the morsel past the gullet. I fancied a sidelong glance at the lifting of the fork to see if anyone were watching this necessary grossness that nature has demanded. Ours was a temperance house without a license, but that meant only an advance payment to the waiter who popped out around the corner and fetched the bottle. This waiter, except for a soiled shirt, was the pink of his profession, and he leaned forward with that correct crooking of the back which is acquired only by English servants. ‘And now, sir, a bit of cheese, sir!” That kind of waiter! Bill had a cramped hall-bedroom, but Beezer and [ were given one of such immensity that our twin beds seemed like little piers that jutted upon an ocean. There were great mirrors as in a ballroom, and a bay window that commanded a view of the sea. A family bath was down the hall, and at each of our ablutions the knob was tried four times on the outside with a little patter of feminine feet that faded off in disap- pointment. Aiter lunch I slept for an hour while Bill and Beezer went out for opera tickets. They returned with a paper sack of gooseberries pronounced goozbriz here in England—but without tickets, for the house had been sold complete. The royal box only was left, but the price was high and our wardrobe was insufficient. A brass band, however, was to play shortly on the pier, and so to the pier we wended our way with spirits alert for merriment. My sleep had so refreshed me that I now looked with a more tolerant eye on the legsTEN THOUSAND LEGS ABOVE THE SEA _ 148 and arms that sprouted from the sand. These people, however sullenly they engaged in sport, thought at least that this was a joyful holiday; and doubtless it was an escape from the crowded streets of a London suburb. The ocean evidently had also dined well, for it had returned with a change of heart to toss its laugh- ing ripples on the sand and cry aloud its invitation to the throng. The pier is like those of Atlantic City—a creature of many legs like a centipede of strange amphibious habit that has crawled from the shore to shallow water and yet hesitates to swim. There is first a band stand with chairs for threepence and music of a jolly brassy sort. Here sat a great concourse—women chiefly at their knitting, dressed in the faded styles of before the war. Bill is getting an obsession about hats and he could not listen to the music because of his ranging eye. He urged me to give an entire chapter to the subject and its effect on the decline of marriage and the birth rate. And surely a courtship at Hastings must be undertaken in the dark, for even in the palest moon a man could searcely lose his balance. “Look at that toque!” said Bill. “The old dame bought it to wear at the opening of the Crystal Palace, and God knows when that was built.” ‘“What’s a toque?” I asked. ““That’s one,” said Bill. ‘“‘Where are the young girls of fresh complexions of whom one reads in novels?”’ I asked. , “Ou sont les neiges d’antan?” said Bill, which of course closed the argument for I had to ask him to144 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY translate. Glibly I read such phrases but my ear needs practice. But he was back on hats. ~ A hat upon a woman,” he continued, “as it is the least necessary part of her attire, justifies itself only if it be beautiful. It is a crown, added for decoration. To other clothing, it is as the asparagus which, we are told, God made last among the fruits as the perfection of his handiwork.”’ And much of this! Beyond the band stand there was a range of booths for the sale of cigarettes, soft drinks, novels of tempted but triumphant virtue, and gaudy jewelry for remem- brance of a holiday. Here one could buy a work of art to be hung in his parlor or laid against an aspidistra plant—a polished shell of ‘‘ Happy Days at Hastings” — to be shown to envious neighbors who were kept at home. A photograph gallery showed beautiful creatures posing on a rock. " Ah,” I said, “‘are any of these ladies still at Hast- ings?” Bill pressed close. ‘They delight my eye,” he added. “Shall we hang about until the tide runs out?” But the man shook his head. He had bought the pictures from a London jobber and the ocean in the background was a painted canvas. Had they been real, skippers along the coast would have strapped themselves that day against the mast. Slot machines offered palm reading and fortuneTEN THOUSAND LEGS ABOVE THE SEA 145 telling—with a wife or husband, dark or fair, as fate decided. I tried my luck at this; but, by accident in my confusion—mistaking the proper slot—raw with inexperience—, I laid out my money for a husband. I drew one with a noble shock of hair and waxed I laid out my money for a husband mustache that I shall hope to be very happy with. It is a loss to some tender creature, deprived by me of mate. There were wheels for trivial gambling with the ponies, where a swain might impress his lady with his recklessness upon the spending of a shilling. At another - wheel there was a chance for a royal flush or string of aces with an onyx clock for prize. Or, for a penny, one146 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY might peep at pictures of naked beauty—for this was the bait upon the sign—, although the pictures were neither naked nor beautiful. The little movie ended, as you turned the crank, just at the absorbing moment beside the tub when the lady still buttoned lifted up her foot. But at Hastings a maid is prodigal enough if she bares her beauty to the moon; nor would a jolt upon the crank dislodge a scandalous sequel. And all the world is eager to know its weight, lest sugar tarts catch them unawares. A chair hangs upon a beam with compensating bars of metal which are thrown in a trough behind until the contrivance hangs even. A placard announces that these scales were used at the Derby for weighing ponies—or jockies, perhaps, for there would have been trouble in stufhng ponies in the chair. An expert stands ready to clasp a lady’s arm or jest about her leg. He then proclaims his guess to the grinning crowd, with money refunded if the estimate is wrong. An oriental personage who chews gum sells tickets to a booth inside of which there reposes a Princess of Siam, announced as traveling now in England on a holiday, who has consented to be seen for a contemp- tible sixpence only. ‘‘Ladies and Gentlemen, step this way! The chance of a lifetime! A Princess of Siam! Queen of the Emperor’s Harem!” Beezer went in to see her, as he said it would help him in his geography. Then comes a turnstile where payment is made to gain the outer promenade and theater. Against the railing of this promenade are chairs and benches and, although one might think that the advantage of theTEN THOUSAND LEGS ABOVE THE SEA _ 147 place was an uninterrupted view of the ocean surf, all of these benches turn their backs upon the water and give their whole attention to the moving cockney throng. Fishing rods may be hired by those who have the inclination, and a line of silent folk leaned on the outer rail with a dark discouraged eye upon the un- fruitful sea. This picture of Hastings stands, I think, for most of the popular watering resorts of England and Wales. I have tried the Isle of Thanet, which is the grossest of all, Brighton, two or three places in Wales and on the eastern coast; and the British sands always reveal the crudity of those thousands who infest them in the summer months. Eastbourne is better. Cromer is not bad, although I saw it when a raw day drove the crowds indoors. Lyme Regis I like, and most of the pebbly sands of Devon and Cornwall which are too far from London to draw a week-end throng. These resorts, too, possess cliffs; and high rocks temper vulgarity. Well,” said Bill, “that’s done. Get me out of this!”’ And now, having had our dinner ministered to us by the crooked waiter in the soiled shirt front, armed with the hotel key—for the door was to be locked at ten o’clock—, we set out to the pier again to witness a performance called “The Poppies” to be given by a company of London favorites. I have read considerable of Leonard Merrick, and many of his stories deal with actors who have failed to gain success in London’s west end and have fallen step by step to these shows upon a pier. These are148 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY tales beneath whose grinning surface there lies a depth of tragedy—of ambition broken and disillusionment, of hunger and illness, of kindness, too, and charity toward those who need it. Merrick himself must have shared this life to know it with such sympathy and understanding. I recall that Conrad once fell in with a company like this in the quest of his youth. The town was Blithe- point, which perhaps was Brighton. ‘‘Before the footlights,” he wrote, “two comic men were bawling a duet; I knew they were comic because they had made their faces so repulsive. . . .”” And then a lady sang “What is the use of loving a girl When you know she don’t want yer to?” And this show at Hastings, but cheaper still, was of the kind that he weaves inside his plots. There was a voice or two that had been of promise once, now coars- ened by misuse; an actress whose face had been pretty in her youth and, even as she screeched and capered, there was a remnant of former daintiness that height- ened the pathos of her antics; a comedian who could not quite conceal a cough beneath a ribald speech; a pianist who thumped at William Tell with a callous thumb that slid down the white keys because her fingers did not have the agility to make an honest run. The audience was moved to bursts of hilarity, but under the painted surface and the empty gesture dis- illusionment lay apparent, days perhaps of hunger. We debated at the close whether we would not step around to the stage entrance and invite the companyTEN THOUSAND LEGS ABOVE THE SEA _ 149 out to supper. Did not Conrad order a chdateaubriand and pommes soufflées for two ladies of the Kiss-and-Tell company when it went upon the rocks at Blithepoint? But Conrad sought his youth, and mine was over seas. We stood indecisively at the stage door, then turned away. And now a rainstorm burst upon us and we pelted to St. Leonards—three men under one umbrella, with trickles of water inside the outside collars. A dance was in progress at our hotel, the kind of dance one expects of purple turbans; and, as we waited for sleep to descend on us, there arose from the dining room below the sound of a saxophone—I Want to be Happy—and so we drifted off._ Se [ thought I missed Gwendoline from the pasture CHAPTER XIII A THOUSAND COWS MEDITATE REVENGE T had been our intention to walk to Pevensey through Battle Abbey, but laziness cast a vote at breakfast for the direct road along the coast. Such idleness is usual to cool a hot decision. In the winter, when you meditate upon a map with wind in the chim- ney, you feel a vast energy at leaping hills and a journey is planned with detour and wayward course. Miles are easy to the slippered feet that sit at home. A morning’s toil is but a space across the palm, and valleys are bridged with the tracing of a finger. The brain runs free without a load and pounds with strength merely because its gears have not been shifted to the legs. On a winter night a man in smoking jacket runs at lions. Only in dreams do we tread lightly the exult- 150A THOUSAND COWS MEDITATE REVENGE 161 ant hills, and our feet are sluggish when we take the road. Our omission of Battle Abbey was immoral, and I lay it to the horrid coffee. An honest bean would have shaken us by the collar and lifted up our spirits to the longer route. It would have been no more than six or seven extra miles, and we would have seen the field of Senlac and the abbey that William built to celebrate his victory. Our path lay along the sand to Bexhill. It is a smaller resort than Hastings but of the same general character with a row of hotels and boarding houses staring out to sea like fishwives in a storm. Two miles beyond Bexhill Beezer cried out that he was hungry, and presently we found a place to eat—a solitary house that seemed to have been washed up to the drier sand. It offered a veranda on the ocean, easy- chairs and the usual cold joint. Bill plunged his knife into his slab of beef. “I do not understand”’ he said, with a gesture toward a meadow where sheep and cattle grazed, ““how those cows can eat with such contentment in plain view of tables where a companion is dismembered.” “You would think” I added, “‘that it would cool their appetites.” “Callous creatures!” Bill went on. “If any cow poked her nose at us across the rail, she would say I thought I missed Gwendoline from the pasture. So that is where she is.” Our road here turned suddenly away from the ocean and started inland as if at last its vacation had beenROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY spent and it journeyed back to work. Once we sat for rest on the stone railing of a bridge above a sluggish drainage ditch. “This” said Bill, taking off his shoes, “is a topmost hour. Is there any simple pleasure of life of such enjoy- ment as pulling the socks away from the toes? After an hour’s hot walk, if you know what I mean.” ‘There is another,” I suggested. ‘And what is that?” asked Bill. ' I like to smooth out my shirt en dedans mon pan- talon, if you grasp my French.” ~ True,” said Bill. ‘‘One does get wopsed inside.” We lay on the turf, with a soft stirring of wind in a lonely tree—a gurgle of water lapping against the bridge. And now for several miles, with Pevensey in sight upon a little hill, we crossed a marshy meadow where sheep and cattle stood about. As far as we could see there were no fences for our safety, and one or two steers gave us an angry gaze and wagged their heads. “These fellows” they seemed to remark with a rotary motion of the jaw, “‘these fellows have fed on us too long. Let’s charge and hook them! Bite for bite— a hot joint against acold one! That fattest man I'l] nip upon the leg.” However, we called them all Good Doggie, and came safe through. A certain lashing of the tail arose, I am now persuaded, from the biting of flies, but politeness was best against the chance of trouble. Nor am I so versed in farmyard ways that I can detect, whether it be—I know a cow, naturally. But what is a steer and how does it differ from a bull? I grope probablyA THOUSAND COWS MEDITATE REVENGE 153 in matters of great delicacy, not for table-talk. Bull and Beezer knew these things, for they walked fearless among these thousand animals and swished their sticks, careless of eternity. Twelve miles from Hastings, in the middle of the afternoon, we arrived at Pevensey. This is another of the Cinque Ports, but we can be thankful the story is already told and by this time happily forgotten. The town lies a mile or so from the ocean on a hill that is just high enough to have thrust up its head in the days when these marshes were under water. Below the circle of the town there is a river, but it is hardly larger than the frequent drainage ditches that intersect the meadows. Pevensey, aS we can read in many books, was the Anderida of the Romans and it stood on the edge of the great forest of the Weald that stretched once from Canterbury almost to Winchester. And before the Romans a British fort stood there, and before that there was probably a still earlier fort until the sequence is lost in antiquity. And these things are attested to the scholars by the coins that have been dug up— British, Roman and Saxon; with here and there perhaps a thrifty penny which a Scotchman may yesterday have banged when he untied his purse. But the most exalted moment of the city’s history was on the twenty-eighth of September, ten hundred and sixty-six, when William of Normandy sailed with ungrazing keel across these meadows and landed before the town. For here was the first touch of the Norman Conquest.154 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY He had in his company several hundred men in black armor, and the scene is shown in one of the Bayeux tapestries worked, it is said, by his lady wife. It is recounted that William stumbled as he stepped ashore, and it would have been a dark omen for his venture if with spry invention he had not quickly grasped the sand with both his hands. ~ see!” he cried, “I have seized the land.” And at that, of course, the aged dames who spin the threads of fate were so tickled by his wit that they changed at once their pattern in his favor. Had William bumped his nose without a timely pleasantry England would have stood successfully against him. But Pevensey is now far ashore in the falling of the Channel with no glimpse from its silent streets of any water that is broader than a ditch. The ocean, that wooed the favor of the town and brought her treasure Irom abroad to deck her beauty, has left her desolate and abandoned. It kissed her once and lay beside her in the dark, then went on a journey never to return. And we may fancy still upon a moonlit night, when memory floats upon the broken clouds, that the old town climbs her ruined battlements and sighs her lonely soul southward to the sea. A house of half-timbered front is now a museum and collects a shilling at the door. I fear it is a bit of a fraud, for its antiquities are all for sale; but the building is six hundred years old with low-raftered rooms made from ships’ timbers and many perplexing corridors, and a visit is worth the price. I would rather anyway pay a shilling and be absolved from purchase.A THOUSAND COWS MEDITATE REVENGE 156 Bill, by using unusual care, bumped his head only once, and I look upon it as a record. At our next we I~ T \ a u\ it AT chy NW 7 . cogs oa . sili Z ; Pek ate al z aor a) =" : ir) A 1 Abe ‘¥ = iW ca par i Saal J Ff fea TR Hy ry a = ¥ oy —t \ oe ba s : ‘ a ay I - = hae Py de: pe eb ! St Ll ——— ere Tod + ie Py a 4 5 r =e py [cP pan Sa ee . : . — a os ee S55 z > Seer . ca 1} > 4 = ~ =~ aT = 3 am a ~ > Y m1 ar: ii Spee Apa ee rio ee ry y ~~ " cd o> al HH ih + a ‘a ot Sa: > A Zo = 1} ry — —_—— © - Ee] Pe Scam pert (Tn Woah Sn ald } | Nees i } Zz — Ue amusement pier I must thrust him on a phrenologist. His head, after these weeks of low-beamed country, will offer matter for strange conjecture.cca ioe cpt * 156 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY An attic is shown behind a cunning panel where smuggled rum was hidden from the King’s tax. With theatrical effect the attendant crossed the room and pulled a rope. This tackle, of course, is new, and in old days one could hardly have guessed the opening. There is, also, the remnant of a mint for Sussex coin, before such manufacture became the duty of the cen- tral government. Many of the articles displayed for sale chiefly furniture, brass, glass and china—were of considerable age and curious beauty; but even machine- made door knockers were loosely guaranteed as genuine antiques, and we distrusted much of it. We asked for beer in the garden of the Royal Oak. It was out of hours but we plead piteously with the landlord to save our worthy lives, so he led us to a quiet spot in the shadows of the tap and set the pewter mugs upon the table—softly, like a poker game upstairs. On the wall was a placard which I have copied Warning! The Indifference of the Public Resulted in America Going Dry. Use Your Vote and Influence Against Local Option. It is the Thin Edge of the Wedge of Prohibition! We were so moved by this appeal that we ordered two more pints. But the chief sight of Pevensey for a man refreshed is the ruin of its castle. It stands on the southern edge of town and the pitch beyond to a drainage ditch mustA THOUSAND COWS MEDITATE REVENGE 1857 have been the ocean shore where William fell and ap- peased the fates by his ready wit. Many of the towns hereabouts terminate in the letters “ey” or ““eye’— Pevensey, Horseye, Rickey—and this proclaims them to have been islands once in the shallow sea. The termination is Danish, but these towns existed in Roman days. The castle’s outer walls stick out to points of irregular advantage against ancient attack and they inclose a large uneven court, now overgrown with grass and shrub, that is used by the village for a playground. Within this court stand the more formidable walls of the central stronghold, with a moat roundabout, now dry—as if, indeed, the dreaded local option had already started here. Even this inclosure is of considerable size and, as we entered, a game of rather cramped cricket was in progress with loud excitement; for 1t was not white-trousered cricket with tea in a gay marquee upon the lawn, but a shabby little cousin of the game, bare- legged with one suspender. Pevensey Castle is in bad repair. A hundred years of lovers have carved their entwined hearts upon the stone, with verses to attest the endurance of their passion. Time, frost, creeping vines and small boys are slowly pulling the walls apart. Give urchins but a frequent holiday and they will subdue the pyramids. In the moat we saw several stone cannon balls, too heavy for us to lift; and these were our vivid ticket to the past. A boy and girl lay on the bank with arms entwined, and they hardly ceased from kissing as we passed. She158 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY was a homely piece of gingham, but Cupid lost his eyesight on his English travels. There is affection in our parks, of course, but it takes its pleasure timidly, as behind ascreen. In England, as in France and in the south, there is less hypocrisy. It was now a question whether we would spend the night here at the Royal Oak or travel six miles to Eastbourne. It was Beezer who decided. We had given the cub a taste of movies and he thirsted for more blood. ‘ How far is Eastbourne?” asked Bill. ‘Six miles.” “Pll collapse,”’ said Bill. And so we went by bus. “I look upon the wheel” said Bill, “as a truly great invention. One’s feet get sore with incessant tapping. An engineer could improve upon us. If a man’s legs could be hooped around, with a knee for axle, he would be the better traveler. If only Burbank would Cross us with a two-wheeled cart!” Across the marshes we saw the Martello towers along the coast. From the distance they look like boxes left by a careless cheese-maker—round stone cupolas rising from the sand at intervals of a mile or so. They were built by Pitt when Napoleon threatened England with invasion, for here it was thought that he would land; but it is said that they were already obsolete against even the crude cannon of that time. And in the contest now in the London press whether the aéroplane and submarine have destroyed the value of the battleship, it has been remarked that floating ships of war are the vain Martello towers of today.A THOUSAND COWS MEDITATE REVENGE 1659 Eastbourne, as we entered, seemed of a richer and cleaner patronage than Hastings. Little plots of grass and flowers lay along the plage. Love prospered not so openly. Our hotel was under London management and was of a better sort. At dinner we had a talkative waiter. ‘Americans tip the best,” he said. ‘““Don’t expect too much,” I answered. ‘“‘We are very poor and stingy.” ‘““And who give the next largest tips?”’ Bull asked. ‘Well, sir, if I may say so, I think it’s the Scotch.” “They haven’t that reputation,” I answered. ‘*He’s joking,” said Bill. “No, sir. Very liberal people, the Scotch—when they travel, sir. I think it’s because they have been ragged a bib. ‘About banging the saxpence,”’ I interposed. “Yes, sir. That kind of thing. A nice tart, sir?” “What kind?” **Rawsbriz!” “Three men once traveled together,” said Bill, “‘an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scot. When the train stopped, the Englishman got out to eat, the Irish- man to drink, and the Secot—’” “Ay, sir,” said the waiter. “And what did the Scotty do?” “He went” said Bill, “through the carriages to find what had been forgotten.”’ 7 “Very thrifty people, the Scotch,” our waiter added. We slipped the usual. “Cue,” he said, with rising inflection. This is a160 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY common word in England and it has nothing to do with billiards or the stage. One hears it everywhere, usually from persons to whom one has given a shilling. We saw a play that night upon the pier, and we were shamed by our walking dress; for there was a general display of white shirts and evening wear. I must exclude Eastbourne from my denunciation of the British coast resorts. Here once in a while a boat is wrecked.LAD / jm AF VF Vij == A Toe . ANUTETT \ BESS ees . = = ZZ Th TU im bee . \ H \ de Ee (OES aif} i] ih (ier ea ii Ut ChAT —_: a eel 7 ry . —— SALUT. fe 4% Bore A blind and melancholy fiddler he } l \ H ae : . CSIR VATA War MEP ee aa oe CHAPTER XIV OVER BEACHY HEAD TO ALFRISTON ESTERDAY we had walked through meadows that were but half reclaimed from marsh and it had seemed like a kingdom insecurely held from watery conquest, but Eastbourne terminates to the southwest in the high ridge of the South Downs. These hills run eastward for a hundred miles from Chichester along the coast, but here at last they get their courage to plunge headlong to the sea. I have seen boys run along a pier to gather this same courage. Eastbourne of late years has grown in popularity and its last houses are dotted up the slope of Beachy Head, as if the town had hurled its whitened spray against the cliff. We turned, of course, to look down upon the 161162 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY general roofs, the stretch of pier, the pretty plots of grass and flowers that grow beside the sand. Halfway up a sharp-pitched meadow we sat for rest where the town had fallen out of sight below the shoulder of the hill. The ocean Jay five hundred feet below us. Sails winked in the morning sun, and steamers went about their business like stolid merchants who smoke a black cigar. A ship put off for France from New Haven down the coast with a trail of water widening at the stern. It is the wake of a ship, I am told, that betrays it first to the aéroplane, and on Beachy Head we saw how this is true. There were higher downs above us to the north, and the wind was too busy with the traffic of the clouds to visit our sheltered slope. ~ Now T’ve done it,” said Bill. “I thought a wisp of hay would be the very thing to clean my cigarette holder. But the fuzzy end has stuck.” Kach of us in turn vainly bellowed out his lungs to clear the tube. “And now” said Bill, ‘‘what’s become of the spring that goes inside?” So we lay on our stomachs and scrutinized the ground. We moved on presently and dropped a penny in the cup of a blind and melancholy fiddler who played for trippers beside the path. He heard the rattle of the coin and nodded his acknowledgment as he sawed his pathetic tune. At the top of the incline there is a hotel and a pavilion for refreshment. We were now beyond the highest ridge of Beachy Head and our view swept the ocean to the west, withOVER BEACHY HEAD TO ALFRISTON 163 much high tumbled land upon the north where church towers here and there marked a town that lay snugly in a valley; for man seeks an easy living, safe from the windy racket of an upland. ‘There are few trees or hedges on these downs, and the lower growth of shrub and thistle crouches near the soil to be shielded from the storms of winter that play at noisy tag from top to top. On many of these rounded summits, as my map in- forms me, there are remains of Roman camps, and even to the eye the markings of mound and fosse are quite ap- parent. This is the home ot South Down mutton, and patches of sheep stood munching for our eternal lunch. Far off across the world we saw a wind-mill in outline on a hill, but its lazy arms did not answer to the breeze. This was our first acquaintance with the downs of Sussex. It is a district of which many poets have written, and always with a touch of homesickness as if they wrote in foreign lands and dreamed of coming back. Of these poets chiefly are Kipling, Swinburne and Hilaire Belloc. I shall be scanty in quotation, for an author must write his own book to earn an honest royalty. The lines ot Swinburne are too softly fluent for this windy coast. He should have been of Latin race and applied his melodies to a lazy climate. Hills and valleys where April rallies his radiant squadron of flowers and birds, Steep strange beaches and lustrous reaches of fluctuant sea that the land engirds, Fields and downs that the sunrise crowns with life diviner than lives in words.ian liegatnine nn snaps to ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY And this that follows is from Hilaire Belloc— homely stuff that does not twist the tongue. When I am living in the Midlands, That are sodden and unkind I light my lamp in the evening: My work is left behind: And the great hills of the South Country Come back into my mind. 2 If I ever become a rich man, Or if ever I grow to be old, I will build a house with deep thatch To shelter me from the cold, And there shall the Sussex songs be sung And the story of Sussex told. I will hold my house in the high wood Within a walk of the sea, And the men who were boys when I was a boy Shall sit and drink with me. ‘Does it occur to you” I asked, “that this would be an excellent place for a pint of stout?” ‘You read my heart,” said Bill. He sat for a long time in meditation, slowly swishing the liquid in his cup, his eye lost in the vastness of the Downs. He nodded to thoughts that swayed his brain. A dreamy mask settled on his face. What would issue from those lips? I hushed Beezer with a warning finger. Some phrase of Teufelsdréckh, perhaps, aloft upon his tower of Weissnichtwo—a line from Shelley of the Caucasus a flash to pierce with lightning our dumberOVER BEACHY HEAD TO ALFRISTON 165 sense. At last he spoke—in even tones—calmly, as fits an utterance of wisdom. “It’s’—he paused for emphasis and swished the liquor in his cup. ltisia very, very lovely view,” is what he said. We hoisted out and followed a rocky motor road with a wide prospect of ocean and hill to the village of Birling Gap. Here we had lunch in an old-fashioned room with a picture of a young lady in flounces, romping with a spaniel. There was, also, a clock which did not run. And I am now convinced that these idle clocks of Eng- land, knowing how faulty is their guess upon the hour, have decided it is nobler to be right once each day and night than to dawdle wrong forever around the dial. We have known persons unlike them who, prattling their ignorance without cessation, would be better if their machinery also stayed unwound. At Birling Gap we struck uphill backward from the ocean and, mist now lying on the sea, ships floated in the sky with the horizon’s chart quite lost. Green Sussex fading into blue With one gray glimpse of sea. A great valley sloped upon our right, with the hotel on Beachy Head cut sharp against the sky. And in the lowland was a lonely grange with buildings huddled close. Bill is quick at horrible suggestion, and in the manner of Sherlock Holmes he laid here a plot for a murder and pointed out the barn where the body was discovered. But now a friendly sun shone on the hills, and storm and night were needed for his dark invention.166 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY A mile or so from Birling Gap, when we had climbed high above the ocean, the road broke sharply from our upland and slithered down a hill to Eastdean: and it seemed a pretty village from above, with spire and smoking chimneys. But a man with long legs came flapping down the path and he advised us to cut a cor- ner through an oak wood at the left and to follow a lane and fence which presently would bring us by a shorter walk to open meadows and the town of Friston. It was a wood of massive trees, for it was sheltered by the hill and unfretted by the wind. One in the mood of Arthur Rackham might think that fairy crea- tures lay in the tangled roots. And to thread this path when twilight fades to darkness would be to real- ize that hour when it is almost fairy time on earth and little heads peep out to learn whether yet the common world is off to sleep. All the morning a windmill had teased us on this rim of northern hills and now, popping from the wood at Friston, suddenly we came upon it. It was in bad repair and lay off from work, like a windmill which had heard about the dole; but if ever it took the whim to swing its arms at night when fancy is the sharpest, it would have seemed a giant to any rural don of slender wit. By day, however, it was a beast of excellent good nature and we lay down beside it for a rest. At our elbow was a graveyard of moldy stones, and close at hand an ancient church. In a hollow where the two roads forked was a pond, and here a cow stood knee- deep in the mud and whisked at flies. From Friston the road followed a line of high land in aOVER BEACHY HEAD TO ALFRISTON 167 westerly direction, with a range of distant hills in prospect across the meadows to the north. Below us in a grove of blackest shadow was Westdean, which seemed but a manor house and farm buildings grouped about. Then presently our road pitched downhill to the marshy level of the Cuckmere River. It is a lazy stream, wandering without ambition through meadowland. The ocean is but a mile to the south but its vast excitement is unguessed. Streams hurry on their upper courses and they leap downward from the hills, eager to reach the lower world and bear their part in brave adventure. They sing of the mighty tasks that will be theirs, of the roar of cities and the ships, of storm and tide upon the sea. re Never yet a rill did flow But longed into the world of men to go. But when they have grown their beard and the task is nearly at their hand, they fall perversely to sleepy ways. Their ambition is lost when they feel the salty tang that borders on the sea. At the Cuckmere River we turned south on a narrow road. And here Bill cried out ““Oh, my soul!” and sat down abruptly through sheer fatigue. “You go on,” he said. “I have lived many years and found life good. It is a pleasant spot. Here let me die.” The valley is flat and marshy. There are trees in the creasing of the hills, for the woods come down to drink along the stream. But the high land is mostly bare and open to the sun. This is but a few feet above the ocean and must once have been an inlet for smaller168 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY vessels. Alfriston, up the river, where we were bound, was once a smuggling town, and this road of ours from the beach of Cuckmere Haven was the route of un- licensed midnight travel. And hereabouts, when we had prodded Bill to ac- tion, we came upona tavern. To our piteous appeal the Nor was he averse to a second mug of beer at Bill’s expense bar was opened and we sat as usual in a shadow far from the window for our mugs of beer. A traveling salesman, also, broke the law with us. His line was woolen goods and millinery. He lived at Lewes, several miles away, and he picked up orders among the small shops of the countryside, with a box of samples on his motor in place of tonneau. Nor was he averse to a second mug of beer at Bill’s expense. Busi-OVER BEACHY HEAD TO ALFRISTON 169 ness was bad, he told us, and it was his desire to get out to Canada. He had visited the exhibition at Wembley, and had fretted since. If things fell right for him he would shortly pack his bag and be off to the grainfields of the west. Meantime he idled for an hour with us. And in this he seemed like the Cuckmere River which also lay stagnant within the sound of the ambitious ocean—dreaming cheaply of the world that opened at the shoulder of the hill where white sails chased the sun to their adventure in the west.= 1 | } - _ | \ x 4 "4 . co gis At } eh | YU jf HN nt 4 Dy ‘ST A Ith YY BVA _ PN 4 Att ‘WY, : PN hy 4 1) AY URAL Kb d 17 UX Ay ne ey ' yt SJ veen The substance of these villages is their church Ath ah CHAPTER XV AND THEN FOR THE NIGHT TO LEWES NOTHER two miles upstream brought us to Alfriston. We reached the town by footbridge and by a path that lay between brick walls and opened on the village street. English tourists passed us on the bridge and they inquired if we could direct | them to a certain church hereabouts which is said to be the smallest in the British Isles. For a moment we wavered whether we would go with them in search of it, but a ghastly smile crossed Bill’s face and our excur- sion was given up. He leaned upon his elbows to ease the weight against his feet and looked with a dark eye upon the stream. ‘I'd rather fling myself over,” he cried out, “‘and rest there in the mud. You and Beezer go.” Alfriston is famous as an ancient town of smugglers, 170AND THEN FOR THE NIGHT TO LEWES — 171 and the Star Inn had been marked at first to be our destination for the night. It presents a half-timbered front to the narrow street and asserts a claim to great antiquity. Its interior is said to be a museum worthy of a visit. But we itched for faster progress and, on inquiry, we discovered that a bus was due in half an hour for Lewes. We held a caucus on the curb. Jimmy’s switt eye had sought in vain a movie up and down the street, and it was his persuasion that urged us on to the larger town on the chance of Douglas Fairbanks. At ashop near by we spent a shilling for toffee, which is England’s univer- sal sweet, left our rucksacks behind the counter with a yellow cat and went off to see the graveyard and the church. ‘Why the church?” asked Beezer. ‘“We’ve seen so many of them.” “Listen, Rollo,” I began, “your uncle will instruct you. Cease but a moment the sucking of your lollipop.” These frequent quests of ours for somber and holy things need not be esteemed to rise from any taint of melancholy disposition. These villages live in the shadow of the past, clad in the mellow garment of tower and wall; and of this ancient vestment the church ‘s chief. There is, of course, a shallow bartering on the streets, a trickle of small errands and activity. A loaf of bread, perhaps, is fetched for supper or a boot sent out for tapping. A thirst starts a song upon 4 holiday. But the substance of these villages is their church. Time is a housewife of a better sort, for she sweeps heran imi: te iis a 172 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY refuse out of doors and sets her treasure on a shelf. These walls were raised by centuries more devout than ours. The church was then the center of all life, and men thought and acted on its nod. It was the house where the artist wrought the beauty of his soul. These steps were worn by feet which laid their purpose bare before their God. At this altar was preached the crusade of daily living. The past is a ghost that haunts a shadowed corridor. Wind strums with yellow fingers an ancient melody on these walls. And far above the muddy current of our present life these crumbling towers stand in dozing contemplation, and any jest or laughter of the street is but a bubble on the flood that drifts beyond the graveyard to eternity. ~ And now, Beezer,” I added, “you may resume your toffee.” The site of Alfriston Church is said by legend to be not the builder’s first intention. Each day elsewhere the workmen laid the stones for a foundation, and each morning when they assembled to renew their task they found them removed to the church’s present site. And so, presently, the miracle was received as an omen and the location altered. Alfriston is a village of rare beauty. The Star Inn is a hotel of easy invitation and it leans forward on the street with a mixture of rheumatism and hospitality. A stone cross marks the center of the town, and there are delightful streets of huddled houses whose gardens must stretch downward to the river with a punt, perhaps, moored against the bank.oe ies | ed = Wier =H HAL, Vis Ye a SPn te TALE | / gee h Doane se Ufheraeyiniie ’ ff ZS 2 eae IEEE a i (77 . Titers \ one mL ue PAN ECS AEP eae 0 Ae ee =a — rie ~SUAt ==-——*,gdetdia + ee | Tra Py Pa , ‘= , ay : ie aes Py ee f b 7 H any t\ tee ah yt Ge -. H 4 - j iy aes 3 or , ve ’ we ‘ , s a. ‘ A sie i‘ h ' \ t ily ‘ a -") Y 4 ; - i) yeep Ne 4 ', « om rd ed en bl bs Fi 4 rar f rk Lb Lee Be ‘ , eye A | {= eh - | i F i ‘ er | F Hi etl 1a fa (ed hen ! ' F = ‘ s i 5 A A LJ ut 5 ‘ , |. r a 7 ie tg ' ® i ‘ i; ye rd | - el | i LI | . ’ | ren fy * i i i me | ] t — O bre ' rl : . ‘ A 10) Bn Tii( Fa —— SS ra =~ —_ Lee =" . Ly hae SS — oS i SS SSS 4 Dil — me NO ee F Seated et eee —_ Waal i eg ‘ r aU Ve , f el Ot ee — W /vira Fi0agy: Wind strums with yellow fingers an ancient melody on these walls174 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY Nor may I omit the old lady who sold us toffee and housed our rucksacks with her yellow cat. She was of quick understanding to our fatigue, eager to run for chairs; and I think that her manners were a legacy from those more gracious days which flourished before the coming of the char-d-bane. She displayed post ecards on a kind of Whirling Susan, and I bought one from each partition to see her spry old fingers count them out. Bill bought a bag of toffee for a child whose hungry nose was flat upon the window, and he selected the small assortment from four bottles to get the widest range of choice. ‘“‘And a peppermint cane,” said Bill. “‘Suck at that.” Presently we climbed aboard the bus at the town cross, and with us was a clutter of men and women and market baskets. I wish that the bus might have traveled roundabout a bit and given us a view of the Long Man of Wilmington, but the driver was on a soulless schedule. This Long Man is a huge outline in white chalk that is exposed upon the hills. No one knows who laid it bare, for all the earliest records men- tion it and confess their ignorance. It is the outline of a monstrous giant who strides down the slope with a staff in either hand. We asked several passengers how to pronounce Lewes. One said Lewis, and another Loos. Wherever we have been we are always wrong. No matter how we say a town, someone sets us right and the next person cor- rects our corrected pronunciation. I do not know yet whether it is Pevensey or Pevénsey, Bodiam or Bojum, Steyning or Staining. I do not care, of course.AND THEN FOR THE NIGHT TO LEWES 1785 But certainly the natives ought to meet and cast a vote and then stick to their decision. At Berwick we changed our bus. And Alciston was next and Beddingham. And then my chin fell forward on my necktie and I slept.Lith FLOR bj 4s Sympathetically I judge a sleepy reader CHAPTER XVI THE PROBLEM THAT ARISES FROM THE SLEEPINESS OF READERS YMPATHETICALLY I judge a sleepy reader. I do not laugh at scars, for I have felt a wound. It is the chief problem of an author, neverthe- less, that he find all warrantable and honest means to keep his drowsy client awake. If he nods, of what use is his fine instruction, the charm of words, the hint toward holy living? A brain all clogged with sleep is as a vessel filled that declines addition. It is the difficulty of the profession that an author can hope for perusal only at night when his readers have spent them- selves on the duties of the day. A lazy slattern may take him up at noon, but to such I do not address my- self. On rare holidays at best may he hope that wor- 176PROBLEM FROM SLEEPINESS OF READERS 177 thier readers will fetch his volume down when the wakeful sun is up and the brain unjaded. And so I have observed that there comes an hour of evening—let us hazard nine o’clock—when unhappily the first vigor of dinner has spent itself and the brain has not led up the gay enforcement of the night against attack. In nine o’clock I strike but on an average. Housewives inclined to a dumpy life, strict men of business who run all day from colloquy to conference, tell me that theirs is eight o’clock when first the evening paper has been laid away. And this is the hour when dull books seem duller still. The laborious fellows who composed them could find then no comfort for their vanity at any glance within the room, and it is well in charity to keep the curtains down. But whatever precisely is the hour, the time comes surely in the early evening that is as zero to a sleepy reader. Many of them, cowards at heart, yield to it. They steal softly to the lamp. They turn it out. They unbutton themselves while they are still upon the stairs. Their collar is off at the landing. The shirt is lifted from the belt in the upper hall. Boots are kicked aside. In the bedroom a general explosion scatters them all about. And yet, if they were of sterner metal, they could endure this zero hour and by pure vigor of the will slip through the shallows, and so persist to midnight which is a more civilized time for bed. Of this power of will I am persuaded. A lady of my acquaintance has told me that her bad time is half-past eight. Even be- fore the striking of the clock she feels its nearness and a consuming lassitude seizes her. Regularly then she178 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY moves a chair, she brushes up the hearth; and so, the critical moment passed, she is good for another dozen chapters of even a stupid novel. I offer a hint to publishers how they may spread their sale of books. They should apply their advertising to the advantage of an earlier dinner and a longer even- ing. Let them start a national campaign to pronounce a man no better than a sluggard who kicks aside his boots when the hour is young. Or, more subtly, they might combine with the dispensers of indigestible foods that tend to wakefulness, and I can fancy their interest pooled with the coffee-growers. Is it too gross that I mention the heavier brands of pie and their effect on the midnight perusal of a masterpiece? But an author must take things as they are, before this reformation shall have been accomplished, and so conduct the method of his writing that his sharpest pages fall mid-channel in the evening when temptation bedward is at the top. Any book, no matter how stupid, can get its first chapter read; and a second, for there still is hope for a better turning. But the danger of abandonment, as in marriage, comes when half is done. Hope then is dulled by repeated disappointment, the scribbler’s bad habits seem confirmed. In my own library I have examined a dozen books to see at what point my own strength gave out, as is indicated by uncut leaves. And I find that the crucial pages are at the middle. If one can pass that shallow, stubbornness will somehow get the reader through. Ships are wrecked upon a coast, but a vessel of words founders most often in mid-ocean where plots are foggy.PROBLEM FROM SLEEPINESS OF READERS 179 And so, now halfway in my book whose scattered leaves all marked with interlineation muss my desk, I am aware that it is only by a mighty effort that I can still further hold the reader inside his boots. I must do something at once by way of advice to him. My dear sir, will you please take a turn around the room. Punch the fire! Sniff the cold night air at the open window! In God’s name push the porch furniture about! Do the awnings need tinkering? Now’s the time! Or, if you decline this display of energy, a remedy must fall to me. Something startling I must have— arresting, shocking, explosive! This is the place, ever, where my plot must sound a gong. Ah.... I suck my pen. Those four dots stand for prolonged thought. Ah. ... Is there nothing exciting to cast upon my pale adventures? If only, at this point, a highwayman could have assailed us! If a motor might have bumped us from the rear! I would choose Bill or Beezer rather than myself, for I am sensitive to pain. A shriek! A broken leg! Death and damnation! Can I find no lady to be rescued from the sea? No scandal to spice my page, or peep of wantonness as is the fashion of novelists? Once again I start my chapter, and now in bolder vein. I shall force my publisher—I shall at least try to force my publisher to a four-inch headline to top the page in the manner of an evening paper when the news is raw.Anger inflames me at the slight CHAPTER XVII THREE TRAVELERS ESCAPE MURDER! A Dangerous Experience in a Country Hotel T is a petty tenant that holds the longest lease upon the memory. On this snowy winter morning, as I write of a departed August—for books of summer are always written in a muffler—there rises in my recollection of our leisured days of English travel how we were locked in our room at the White Hart Inn and could be released only when the chambermaid put her shoulder to the panel. Let me, for variety, cast the occasion in a play! The scene is the inn at Lewes, two flights up. The time is eight o’clock in the morning. The persons of the drama are two young gentlemen in pyjamas, for this Is a bedroom farce with the aforementioned chambermaid for triangle. One of these gentlemen lies snoring in a fitful gust, the other reaches for his stockings. Ist Y. G. Beezer! Qnd Y.G. Kkaaww!THREE TRAVELERS ESCAPE MURDER 181 Ist Y. G. Beezer! Get up! Qnd Y. G. (as before, in a rising gust) Kkkaaawww! (and now again, with loudest nasal fluting) Kkkkkaaaaawwwww! And here for a moment I must suspend the drama for a protest against the English language. There is no group of letters yet devised which conveys the sound of that blast of guttural friction which we know as snor- ing. There is no vowel that by itself alone sets the pallet to quite the respiratory flutter which is required. I have sat at my desk for a full ten minutes practicing the windy suspiration of forced breath that one hears in a sleeping car, trying to fit it toa word. My page will balk a man who reads aloud unless he have the actor’s gift to humanize this word I’ve coined to repair our poverty. I was deep in this experiment, absorbed against interruption, when the housemaid entered to set my room to rights. She gave me a silly look as she patted down the pillows, for to her [am a quaint sort of person who has no occupation that can be called such. I do not rush for a hat right after breakfast. Should I take her in my confidence, I queried, put the problem to her and use her for a model? Yet God forbid that I should listen without a chaperon to a young lady snoring in my bedroom. I depend too much on Mrs. Grundy’s patronage. There is a soughing sustention of sighing suspira- tion, roughened to a saw-edge if catarrh and dreams are partners; but I cannot build it to a word. Cats do not talk English, yet meouw records their182 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY plaintive bleat. Bowwow is the barking of a dog. And moo is good for any cow when thirst or passion moves her. We have contrived words for all of the domestic animals; but when a man, who is the inventor of speech, departs from consciousness and reverts to primal nature in his sleep, no letters can hold his yearn- ing for expression. Kkkaaawww is not entirely bad. If one drains the lungs upon the combination and per- mits his palate, together with all other appurtenance of string and wall that infest his gullet—column, pipe and stalactite—to rattle in the blast, he has in a manner achieved the sound. And yet it is a makeshift left for my invention, unrecognized by Webster. Anger inflames me at the slight. The wheelbarrow has grown to be a mighty engine defying space. Man’s first cave has developed to forty stories, a scooped log become a steamship; yet language falters for a word. I am not deep in science, but our oral poverty seems to show that snoring Is of ancient date and that the medium of its expression precedes all formal language—the use of tools or fire, beyond a doubt,—that it came from forgotten days when man had as yet no alphabet and his untrained tongue roamed within a wilderness of uncouth sound, trying in blind explosion to tell his thought. We are told that the finger nail is the remnant of a claw, that an arm is only a leg which has gone to school. The nose, then, doubtless, was once a beak to swing a man like a parrot upon a tree; and these present disturbances of Beezer are the last vestige of paleolithic man struggling vainly for expression. I looked upon him, as he lay curled in-i et a SE CD THREE TRAVELERS ESCAPE MURDER 183 nocently in sleep, as one imbedded in antiquity, who fights through a thousand years toward his perfection. But this deep speculation has thrown me from my drama. I must cast aside the sock and buskin and proceed in plainest prose. It is a difficult chapter to start. I'll throw these paragraphs in the discard and begin again.i a ST i wae y Lint ttt $i] th cies ans or Timer: Mty ee —: ed J Fe Per ts 5 pa pH ay Rye OB | C ae ee — eet a g va B > te i e ’ ay ake ae i 1 eA * ~ ———_ ryt * . a Ke aa : 3 3 , ’ " _ A = i me Ca ’ Ps , ~ ath “Ue Sa F 7 D ry 1 TM A Le r) ra et ‘ c 1 Oh ty re i ey = f | = i“ CL 4A PISCUMWE FLOA i} | SL oe Sc ae The lock . . . had been damaged by William the Conqueror CHAPTER XVIII A FINAL EFFORT TO COMPLETE THE CHAPTER E could not unlock the door. We turned the key upside down three times and then squinted through the hole for an explanation of the stoppage. We pulled a cord and heard a dis- couraged bell tinkling far down the hall. No one came. | We gazed out of the window to see whether there might | be a coign of vantage for our descent. At length an aged chambermaid, who had been man and boy upon the job for forty years, came to our 184FINAL EFFORT TO COMPLETE CHAPTER = 185 assistance. With combined struggle inside and out, and much heaving of the knee and shoulder, finally we fetched the door open. ‘The old dear uttered no sur- prise at our imprisonment. It was in the usual run of her employment to release gentlemen in pyjamas. The lock, she thought, had been damaged by William the Conqueror and its repair was still delayed. “Beaucoup much!” said Beezer, who studies French. But my gratitude spoke with silent silver voice. I must return to the night before when we entered this town of Lewes. We had arrived at the White Hart Inn at nightfall, and here I found a letter from a friend in London, informing me that she had lately read of a murder in Lewes, perhaps in this very inn. A purse had been taken from underneath a pillow and a throat had been cut. I must be sure, she wrote, that we look beneath the beds and lock the doors. Biull’s wouldn’t lock. Ours locked not wisely, but too well. On Bill’s door was a plate marked “Private.”’ Our bedroom was of the public variety. I had read this note from London in the shadow of the hallway as we entered, and pat upon the cue, like the entrance of a villain, one of a range of chamber bells started vigorously into action just above my head. To my startled thought it seemed a second warning out of darkness. Piteous the echo died away, as if even brass has its softer side. And yet there was something altogether fascinating about the White Hart Inn. There was a musty smell, a clutter of rooms that did not march in order, a snug186 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY tap, a commercial room with a garden at the back. Corridors roamed around in darkness as if they were looking for something they could not find. I have myself poked all round a house for a missing hat. And a flight of steps led off downward to a kitchen of dark- est deviltry. ‘““A quaint old house,” said Bill, as we mounted a broad flight of stairs hung with musty pictures, “not entirely clean perhaps, but better than Robin’s Nest. It hasn’t been changed since it was a posting inn.” There was a great joint for dinner, carved on a table at the top of the room by the landlady herself. A dome-like pewter cover hung above suspended on a chain, and between her assaults upon the joint this was lowered to keep her victim hot. In her private life she was of gentle manner, but she plunged a long sharp knife into the roast and turned it with a vicious twist. I thought of my note from London, but she met my eye with a calmness that proclaimed her innocent of purse and bloody throat. After supper we wandered out to see the town. It 1s an ancient city on a hill, built in feudal days with a lord for master. At the top is a ruined castle with a moat and a wooded esplanade where I am persuaded we might have seen the field on which Simon de Montfort once fought with Henry III, if we had known Just where to look. It was a pretty view across the roofs of the lower town into the shadowed fields beyond. Narrow streets plunge abruptly from the hill, and a legend says that up one of these streets a King of Eng- land once ascended in a coach and four—the steepestFINAL EFFORT TO COMPLETE CHAPTER _ 187 street ever to be climbed in this fashion by royalty. There was once a priory of St. Pancras, who is not necessarily a railroad station as Londoners suppose, and the still-existing kitchen walls are scraped by the Brighton train which is not content to steer around the hill but plunges through a tunnel beneath the town. An express came out of this black hole as we stood watching, drawing after it a cloud of smoke as if hell were down the line. Having walked for an hour, for our diversion we went to Twinks. Twinks is a theater, or perhaps I had better say that it is a last asylum for village talent and for broken actors rejected by more worthy stages. The entrance is by way of a candy shop on one of the steep lanes that plunge off from the high street. It is a narrow dirty hall and excels only in the density of its bad air. As we entered we heard a great roar of applause at a silly jest. The plot, if there was one, consisted of persons popping in and out of doors, and stumbling over mats. And for dialogue ““Now, George, tinkle the ivories!”’ It is said that Jack Palmer, who was a friend of Charles Lamb, once operated a theater here at Lewes; but the town has fallen to Twinks. First and last upon our travels we patronized a half dozen theaters— vaudeville, pictures and drama—and if we in America are ashamed of our own low average, let it be our com- fort that lack of taste is as common in southern Eng- land. Having now watched an actor with a pimpled face stumble on a rug four times to increasing merriment,Vip 188 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY we rose abruptly, filled with septic germs, and left the hall to breathe deeply of the wholesome evening alr. Lewes had drawn its shutters for the night, and shadows lay thick upon the streets. And, if daylight She stood at supper with dripping knife lives with us to keep our present fashion, it is in these | hours of darkness that old habits return to ghostly residence. Lewes was again a medieval city. A guard paced upon the castle battlements. A watchman with a lantern cried the time. Crumbled towers grew per-FINAL EFFORT TO COMPLETE CHAPTER = 189 fect. And far below on the darkened fields Simon de Montfort walked before his tent to plan assault at dawn. We entered the White Hart. The bar was shut. The hall was dark. The row of chamber bells hung silent at the office wicket. Then one of them moved slightly on its wire. Was it the wind from the open door? Or was this faintest tinkle a lingering echo of the past— a message caught in returning broadcast from horse- drawn days when coaches, mired on the London road, came belated into Lewes and clamored from their bed that a nightcap be fetched upstairs. Perhaps Tom Jones had quartered here, and this was his call for rum that stalked across the years to seek utterance in this shadowed hall. But as we climbed the musty staircase to our rooms I thought again of my note from London, and in my fancy I saw our landlady as she stood at supper with dripping knife. We set our bolts, looked beneath our beds and fell asleep. And this, dear reader, is how we escaped murder in a country inn.EE ey - - —x = — lulta f9¢CuIiVve FLOR / j —_——_ _—____ —— ri ———————— | a ee pAb od Ralaiey) } Hey Their mother had pooled her offspring at a bargain counter | | £g CHAPTER XIX SAFE AGAIN IN TRIVIAL MATTER ELL,” said Bill, “this is Saturday. On Mon- day George comes.’ For it had been arranged when we left Lon- don that on this day we were to telegraph a friend in the city to join our trip for a week or so. We looked at a map for a town where he could meet us Monday morn- ing. It had been our intention to strike west from Lewes across the South Downs to Pyecombe and lay over there for the Sunday when trippers are the thickest and the going bad. But we could not find what trains would stop from London and so we changed our route to ——— Brighton. This was a concession to necessity as we knew it to be a tawdry place like Hastings, crammed with tourists on a dirty beach, and we preferred the quieter town among the hills. From Lewes to the west, also, there was a mesh of paths on windy meadows, sheep trails 190SAFE AGAIN IN TRIVIAL MATTER 191 up and down, beacons to be climbed, and Roman mounds and ditches. We had hoped to walk upon a ridge and count the spires of sheltered villages. Our road to Brighton crept in a lowland along the railroad track and held no invitation for the eye. Our friend George was a musician, a pianist, the organist of a city church, whose talents would already have made him famous except for his modesty and the ill fortune of the war. It was but a morning’s walk to Brighton, but the day was overcast with promise of rain and so we went by bus. These journeys of quick explosion are too rapid for impressions; for the eye is a sluggish camera even if the day is sunny, and it declines to record a picture except on a time-exposure. I recall only that there were three girls on the bus, all clad in identical shawls as if their mother had pooled her offspring at a bargain counter. All else is a smudge of running trees and poles—villages pelting up to London for the sights. ‘How I love a walking trip!” said Bill, as he stretched his feet to the seat in front. And so we rattled on, until the city came in sight. Brighton passed its innocent youth as a fishing vil- lage. It was Brighthelmstone then and was little more than a distant suburb of the older town of Lewes—a range of dingy houses on the beach where boats were stranded by the falling tide and nets were strung on poles to dry. | But it happened that a certain Richard Russell, physician of Lewes, published in seventeen hundred and fifty a book on sea water as a cure for this and—_— a oon 192 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY > that—how it healed among other ailments a faulty lung. It was doubtless a tome of hard and learned phrase, but of such persuasion that presently many of his patients threw away his former lotion, packed their bags, called out the family horse and bounced to the ocean to renew their health. I fancy that this exodus (so far beyond his intention) must have cut his golden fees, for in seventeen fifty-four—his inland snuggery being now bare of patients— he also made the journey with all his domestic appurtenance and hung out a new shingle near the beach for reviving profit. On the sand all day his patients sat until the salty tang restored their health, and happily once more there was a gold deposit beneath the shingle. And this was the beginning of Brighton’s greatness; for in the course of time its good report spread to London, became the gossip at dinner tables and fetched back a sprinkling of pasty folk who wasted in the smoke. And among them, no doubt, were persons of high position; perhaps a Duchess even with a cough, to sit upon the beach and drink tea beneath her parasol. Such persons must be entertained, for convalescence has its lazy hour and turns to games of chance and sport. So balls were contrived, and masquerades to ape the vanity of London. In seventeen hundred and eighty-three the Prince of Wales, just one and twenty, alive for dissipation, came also to test the waters; and this newest place of pleasure by his patronage became the vogue. A pier was built, a ballroom, a gilded hall for gambling. All of the English cures and baths arose at the nod ofSAFE AGAIN IN TRIVIAL MATTER 193 royalty. Tunbridge Wells took its start when a Queen’s coach rattled in for lodging. Popularity came to Epsom when Charles II built a palace two miles away to house a mistress. The waters of Bath had spouted up with complete neglect for a thousand years, but they regained their Roman prestige when Queen Anne pro- nounced here an inner comfort. ep ok And so it was with Brighton. So charmed was his fat highness by a brief prospect of the English Channel, so soothed by its salty air, that in seventeen eighty-four he sent his cook ahead from London to engage a house. And presently he designed and built a palace here for his holidays. This still stands and is known as the Pavilion—a museum now with entrance for a fee, for tides of fashion rise and fall. We saw it from the bus as we rattled in. ‘““My sainted grandmother!” cried Bill. ‘‘ What horrid thing is that?” It is a Moorish structure of minaret and exotic decoration, but of a tawdry cheapness as if bricks and honest native wood were ashamed of their perversity. Nothing could be less suited to its setting. It is a touch of Bagdad at contract price, surrounded all about with common tourist lodgings. It is a scene-painter’s night- mare of an eastern paradise. Was this same Prince of Wales really an Englishman and the fat fellow who took snuff and rollicked with Beau Brummell? I seem to remember that Aladdin. once fell to the dark glance of a Sultan’s princess and that their course of love ran rough. He rubbed his lamp for remedy and called upon the genie to build himHo | | \ ee te “ ee . 9 sm 194 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY a palace in the night to bear off the princess while she slept. I had thought that their flight was eastward across the Chinese mountains. Yet here is a Moorish palace quite lost and out of place. A wall is cracked as if in the giddy journey oversea—or did the genie scamp construction in his haste? One must believe that Aladdin sickened at last of the foggy English cli- mate and led his bride home from these barren walls to seek pardon and the sun. Be that as it may, royal tenants have departed, and the spacious rooms and corridors are come to vulgar use while trippers gape upon their tawdry splendor. But evidence exists of a time not so long ago when this building was held in awe. A hundred years back there lived in Brighton a certain George Richardson, who was at first a silk salesman behind a counter, then a geologist, scholar and an actor. He wrote a sonnet, The Pavilion. O, I would roam around thy turrets, while They bask in moonlight beauty, while Romance Wakes the high visions of the holiest trance, And bids her fairest forms the might beguile. This and more! But at noon the Pavilion is as bare of holy trance as any set of stage scenery that is ex- posed to daylight in an alley at the stage door. And so the Prince of Wales came down to Brighton, and fashion set up its rule. There were masked balls, and games of chance, ogling, omber, dancing, drinking and intrigue. Theaters were built for London com- panies. The beach became a parade for flounce andowen — mS . if NYY Woe Tees ahaa) PANS I W) f CEG N q : J \ e 7 = bay wT es oS . Dp C\/ filer : En ye ALT ere on Bf, “a, S es + hme ol X ? wth the AGF ee " M4 AAA) a . aA ny Px MEN OY 7 Wap? < NAY he et | 6 1 NS - —"t . \ en) ‘i a ' U ( SSS7 f F aa — ——s - q c =x i} SS UG Ane ‘ AN ‘| bite { | 72S e * Ce = = \ r 7" 7 2 } , a Lf . 5 Wh ess y y | PAR eu AVP Kce \ A vs MY he Mi J ! iY Ae i I Ait c ‘ ' es WS aS ' r Wage) rf 1d AGH ' —— , Me - << ms a xe Sea M S 0 va f —— , . ( r +4) ™~ we o (¢ a «, (ee fo, A ie 3 vA . i/o iA , U fi y NY LR ed PI PPOCRNY YS) Daa. Wwvic: Ds \ LJ dl N DW)! NDDID. Ly Ae | OY ARS anny ay A f | \ VA | B\/ Sy cp A OTs a ip, wr RRL AR ))>) >) i, ade Nee Re WK .: ry) Nef) “4 AW) : N V4 Cas i) f i) p é AE OY) AGS Y La i 5) NS ))} ) yp RE ) ras hy / j y pa Ears eek Tb ae a oof SS hs ’ ity I, h ) a he waar * / Ry yy 4° >» ony XS cs = 4 A ghost in the gardens of a misty paradise 231 \ \( i AW ~ \ Red pe A c Seite - Ss A ~ NS BA fy= ~ . ~ f= Uy + C | fer ig . A chair with a wheeze that is bent with disease | Don’t you know that the day is slipping away, While you flatten your nose on the pane? I’d smash, if I dared, the glass, but I’m scared, And I’d break in your head with my cane. We rested at West Dean in a village church. At Cocking we pitched downhill from lofty country and left the Downs behind. Legend reports that thisWE SEE A GENTLEMAN BEREFT OF REASON 261 country of the Downs was the first to be created when God fashioned the dry land, and that their beacons were His practice for higher mountains. At Cocking, Bill cried out “Oh, my soul!” Nor did a Dublin stout set him entirely on his legs. So he bartered for a motor to lift him the last four miles to Midhurst. Beezer, also, lay off here for tea and toast, so I pelted on alone. It was dinner time when I climbed into Midhurst and went among the inns to find my lazy comrades. Midhurst sits upon a hill with an open square at top. This is the center of the town and, although I was tired with my sharp walk from Cocking, it seemed a picturesque place of feudal aspect, as if a gate each way might be shut against attack. Democracy sprawls upon a plain, but a hilltop town is usually of older date and despotic rule. The very steepness, that kept it safe in troubled times from the brawling warfare of the valley, has lamed it in the race of modern progress; for commerce bears a heavy load and cannot climb a hill. In parts of the world still older, as in the Italian mountains or the Alps that hang upon the Riviera, every peak is the lodging of an ancient town driven thither for defense. To see the splatter of houses upon these dizzy pinnacles one might think that from the ancient tide that once roared up- ward in the valley, these are the wind-caught spray. But Midhurst sits upon a little hill which war might have climbed with cannon. Our inn was the Angel, a bit below the top at a left- hand turn on the highway to the north. It was a fine old building with candles and musty smell—a resortJ oo em F ' fers *y rr ie \ jp four YCvve Row S LOEW ALR LOO These are the wind-caught spray 262 : ; . \ ’ ty ¥ ; 7 Ww, , 1 \ : 4 . a: eg ccc seer i itn looper aera dest a err eerie neneteainelitineaitegneren ne va Ga\y * eRe ee RR RN ne .WE SEE A GENTLEMAN BEREFT OF REASON 263 at week-ends for motorists and sportsmen. It was now Saturday night and, although we had a bed apiece, all rooms were sold for Sunday. A ripe waiter, with a soiled shirt front, did us well at dinner. Then we roamed for an hour about the village and tell again to bed.Perhaps the horrid smell . . . might be explained CHAPTER XXVII NORTH TO HASLEMERE TI’ breakfast Beezer reported a disturbance of the night. Having divested himself of clothing in his usual explosive manner—as if he popped with too much dinner—he was climbing to his rosy couch when there came a rapping at the door. Advancing with gusty candle to the summons he was informed by a chambermaid that a lady of wrinkled nerves reposed in the adjoining room—or would repose whenever by God’s mercy sundry sounds were quieted 264NORTH TO HASLEMERE 265 -1 Beezer’s room. Furthermore would Beezer be so considerate as to surrender the key to the door that lay between the rooms so that this rearward postern would be garrisoned and sate. And yet again perhaps the horrid smell that now issued through the keyhole might be explained to still the lady’s fright. Beezer gave up the key, but was innocence itself about the smell and noise. However, he assured the maid that all sounds and smells—if, as and when, issued—would at once abate. “And were you noisy?” we asked at breakfast. ‘Not that I remember,” he answered. And then he added slyly, “But now that lI think of it—yes, l knocked over a chair three times, dropped my shoes and was probably singing. ” “And the smell?” we persisted. “That?” Beezer grinned upon his bacon. “It was a pink marshmallow,’ he replied, “that I was toasting at the candle.” Midhurst is a town of contented living. At the week- end, perhaps, a motor clatters in with men who fish or hunt; but on quieter days its mellow buildings stand around its square with hands deep in pocket, and streets slope off the hill all four ways into the woods and meadows of peaceful country. Beneath the town the Rother loops across the valley in shallow course with a message that is carried to the turmoil of the sea. Here leaves and grasses run from home, but they falter at the turn like children who have come upon a highroad at their garden gate where the world spreads wide. A railroad of lazy single track veers to the easy low-ne a eee ee 266 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY land and spares the town from loud prosperity, and if ever a whistle blows on its infrequent train it is a voice that calls vainly to the hill to join its noisy life. Verses have been made about this railroad, and I suspect that Mr. E. V. Lucas is the author, although he modestly does not confess it. My heart leaps up when I behold A single railway line: For then I know the wood and wold Are almost wholly mine. It is a road of only intermittent errand. Its cars are old and they stop at random here and there as if they were retired from active business and picked at daisies in the village stations. Bill. And where now? Myself. To Haslemere. Bill. And have we seen the sights of Midhurst to our entire content? Myself. Patience yet a bit! Even now as we leave the town we draw near to Cowdray Park. Bill. And are you to throw another sentimental spasm as once at Arundel? ~ We must let the sequel show,” I answered. And now from Bill again. “What is this Cowdray that we are to see?” Myself. It is the double star of Midhurst. The house was gutted by fire rather less than a hundred and fifty years ago, but the walls stand in a cover of Ivy which catchesNORTH TO HASLEMERE 267 Bill. Just so. Spare yourself. I know your style by heart. Myself. One must write as he can. Bill. And one can skip as he wishes. “Just so,” I answered. And in this manner of retort we came to Cowdray Park, and stood upon a little bridge to look upon the ruin of the house. And here I whipped out my note- book and fell to scribbling. “TLet’s hear it!” said Bull. “And then you'll laugh.” ‘Quite possibly,” he answered. “The open casement of this broken tower” I read, “+5 9 frame for floating clouds; and nature, like a crafts- man, dips here his brush in blue and white to fit the changing purpose oi the windy sky.” “Ts that all?” said Bull. “Not quite,” I answered. “Through lower win- dows, where peeped once a loaded banquet, meadows are exposed; and at the wide table of the hills sheep are the only guests.” “And you are paid for words like that,” said Bull. “Not much! Not much!” I answered sadly. And now, in his weakened state, I drew out a guidebook and I read to him as follows, cutting out a bit now and then so as not to overstrain him. Cowdray, I began, was built in the reign of Henry the Eighth, but 1t came to its highest fame when Elizabeth was Queen. It seems that Sir Anthony Browne, who then possessed it, got early word that the Spanish Armada had weighed anchor at Corunna.ee = nen — a 268 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY Straightway he rushed to London and was the first to lay his service at the disposal of the Crown. And so, when the anxious days were passed and the Armada lay shattered on the coast of Ireland, the Queen came in state upon a visit to thank her servant for his loyalty. A pamphlet still exists ’ Are you sure of that?” said Bill. ~ I can but take the author’s word.” And again J stole from Lucas: ~ “Upon sight of her loud musie sounded. It stopped when she set foot upon the bridge, and a real man, standing between two wooden dummies whom he exactly resembled, began to flatter her exceedingly. Until she came, he said, the walls shook and the roof tottered, but one glance from her eyes had steadied the turret for ever.’ ”’ “Skip that part!’’ said Bill. “At breakfast next morning’”’ I continued, ‘“‘‘ three oxen and a hundred and forty geese were devoured .. . marvellously, nay rather excessively.’ And with flattery and food they passed three days.” “It’s rather a side light on Elizabeth,” said Bill. “Itis. “On Wednesday,’” I continued, “‘‘the Queen was taken to a goodlie fish-pond (now a meadow) where was an angler. After some words from him a band of fishermen approached, drawing their nets after them; whereupon the angler, turning to her Majesty, re- marked that her virtue——’ ”’ eeth sho!’ ened ill, Had he never heard of Leicester?” 6 ‘—made envy blush and stand amazed. HavingNORTH TO HASLEMERE 269 thus spoken, the net was drawn and found to be full of fish, which were laid at Elizabeth’s feet. ... On Thursday the lords and ladies dined at a table forty- eight yards long, and there was a country dance—— ” “Enough!” said Bull. Haslemere was our destination for the day. This we could gain by a straight road to the north, or round- about through Cowdray Park at the expense of two or three extra miles. We chose the longer route at a great profit of enjoyment. Lodsworth was our target, three miles across the park. We were directed to follow a path through a barley field, climb a stile, mount an open meadow, cross a road and continue upon a stretch of pasture and a wood which crowned a hill. It was as dubious as the ‘nstruction that Tony Lumpkin gave the travelers— «. damn’d long, dark, boggy, dirty, dangerous way.” But before we lost ourselves among the paths that spread confusion in the wood, we lay at ease under an oak that stood above the barley field. Once more it was a stirring day and the wind was busy with the clouds. Give the creature but a broom and it sweeps the cobwebs from the ceiling of its house. “What! Not again?” said Bill. But 1 ignored him. In the foreground, a mile across the meadow, stood the broken walls of Cowdray Castle, mended somewhat by the distance. Above rose the line of the South Downs, with here and there a white road running to the top for a glimpse of ocean. We were on the edge of the Weald—the Wild, as we would say. It is now tamed to village use, but was once a broad belt of marsh anda a mile beyond. As we left, one of them lifted nicely with 270 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY forest that guarded London from attack. The Downs are flecked with woodland and patched with grain where hedges stitch the fields. There in the dip and crossing of the hills the Devil dug to drown the Saxon churches. In this shade Elizabeth may once have waited for the deer that were driven to her gun. But no smoke rises now from Cowdray Castle. Its heavy feasts are eaten. Cook and Queen have departed to the long horizon of eternity. Having eased our legs, we crossed the road to a sloping meadow and came upon a herd of deer in the slavish charge of a single leader: for when he halted at our approach, all of his followers stopped. Six hundred mild eyes confronted us in alarm. like a large nursery of children who are told of Bluebeard. Then in a flash— perhaps when the sixth wife is found hanging to her peg—the deer all wheeled about and bolted up the hill, with a frightened little scamper at the rear. We came presently on a golf course where two men were going badly in the rough. Bill was crying aloud the Hojotoho from the Valkyrie. ' Be quiet!” I said. ‘And why?” Bill answered. ‘You will annoy the golfers.” ‘It should inspire them.” But he desisted. At our question of Lodsworth they informed us that they were strangers down from London; but they pointed loosely to the wood and said that some village, although they knew not its name, was situated about a prising ie Ta a eteNORTH TO HASLEMERE 271 his niblick from the sand and the ball rolled up near the cup. We entered a wood of ash and beech, and pushed through brier and grass. And now, being tossed about on bypaths, we came upon an avenue of massive trees. It must once have flanked a road, but the footing now was tangled and neglected. One could believe that ‘+ led to the house of a sleeping princess in some for- gotten valley of the hills. And then we climbed to a higher point where a meadow opened up a view. Here we heard a motor horn and came shortly to a highway. And now by frequent question in a mesh of crossroads we came at last to Lodsworth. But these hours we spent in Cowdray Park stand as a memory apart in the pleasure of our trip. We rested for a pint of beer. And trom the village grocer we bought for each of us a hunk of cheese, a pocketful of crackers and a jar of minced chicken which we passed about and speared upon a knite. It was thus we lunched as we tramped ahead. So, with snatches of tragic opera from Bill between bite and bite, we progressed merrily to Lickfold where a tavern called the Three Horses stood against the road. The cheese and crackers being now launched but stranded in the channel we swept them downward with a pint of beer. Beezer’s was as usual a ginger beer. A far-off look came into his eyes. He was homesick for an ice cream soda, and it was in this respect alone that he considers that English civilization fails. If nut sundaes could be scattered through these towns they would fill his cup of happiness. - =e end al 5 | || ] 279 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY | Nt | And now a two-wheeled cart was pushed slowly up Vt } oe i the road and an itinerant umbrella mender shared our Ww bench. He lifted his pewter mug, he wiped his lips, he iy : ; i | | | ey ied Ros t i | See OE eae There will be broken umbrellas to mend all the way to Petworth | spoke of England’s distress and her millions out of | work. Then he uttered in confidential sadness, ‘‘ There are too many marriages, and too few funerals.” ButaNORTH TO HASLEMERE 273 sudden gust of rain blew up the road and he brightened at this hint of better business in his own particular line. “Tf this squall continues,” he said, “there will be broken umbrellas to mend all the way to Petworth.” “Another beer?”’ said Bill. “The same!”’ replied the tinker. He left us and pushed his cart up the hill, and the flat tinkle of his bell again cried out his wares. At Fernhurst we rested. It is a picturesque village of ancient cottages that repose about an open square. A half mile away the highroad runs from London, but it swerves off in a curve of hills and Fernhurst hears no more than a distant horn. This is the charm of Eng- land. One needs such a slight detour to escape the char-A-banes, and if he choose a secondary road he walks in peace among sleepy towns that are nested in the trees. As we lay on the green at Fernhurst we heard the tolling of the village church bell, and soon men and women in sober Sunday black issued trom their doors. It would have been an impertinence to inquire whose funeral it was. I like to think that a person of eighty peaceful years came at last to the turf beneath the yews, that grief was hushed m the thought that here was a life complete. In these English villages where the graveyards lie so familiar to the living, death seems but a slight transition from one cottage to another. The lease of a garden plot runs out, and in solemn ceremonial with neighbors all about, another lease 1s written that is of longer tenure. A new-cut stone is an added chapter to the village annals—a book that runs—— eng ata eg ann star ee ors ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY for a thousand years with shifting persons in its endless plot. And when the tolling bell has died away, children swing again laughing on the gate, and their jest and cry are as fitting to the peaceful yard as the echoing hymn or the song of wind and bird. After Fernhurst we came upon the highroad and in an hour we limped into Haslemere hard on dinner time. This is a town at the center of hotels that perch on the nearby advantage of the hills, but we chose the White Horse in the high street as a sufficient hotel that was near at hand. At the crossroads in front is an or- namental lavatory with a plate “To the Memory of Mrs. Stewart Hodgson.” Such a useful memorial must please her practical soul, wherever it may be. There is a town hall on the second story, but the whole building smells vilely of disinfectants and authors of verse express their dirty genius on the walls. As we entered Haslemere the Salvation Army was hard at work upon the curb to save the town from hell. There was a jangling of tambourines to draw a crowd and a young gentleman with pimpled face launched upon a fiery sermon. When the tambourine was passed I dropped in a sixpence. Cue,” he said. on pees ot a et ean eee cea le RS FE ge ASE tt ae he ieneTL Lubes 5 ein LAT = hy bra pron . vy et 1 aN BY LD y// WG SM 19 SIECONE. anes Herself, not the Pekinese CHAPTER XXVIII A DIVIDEND FOR GUINNESS ASLEMERE stands in a hollow between Hind- head and Blackdown, six hundred feet above the sea—a prodigious boast in England—and it asserts that it is the loftiest town in all the south, although a careless Alp would stub its toe upon these hills. It was a borough in the reign of Elizabeth. Later, James Oglethorpe sat for it in parliament, and he was the man who founded Georgia and named it for the 275 —_— ~ - - - 3 rd iin nena ate POC oe OE eel tp ete wares — - eae~ aw pir —~-aeanenga sat 276 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY King. And Oglethorpe also reformed the English prisons. A friend, thrown into the Fleet for debt, had neglected in poverty the payment of the warder’s fees and was cast within a house of smallpox where he died. It was this that stung Oglethorpe toward his reform. John Tyndall is buried in the town’s graveyard and his tomb is a mound of heather, for it was his request that the place of his interment be forgotten. Tennyson lived on Blackdown to the south, and sometimes a com- pany of poets journey down from London with a wreath of laurel and a hamper of lunch and they dispose of each as you might expect. Hindhead to the north held long a reputation for solitary grandeur, but villas and hotels are scattered up the slope and it needs the mist of twilight to restore its lonely magic. At breakfast we determined to climb Blackdown and if possible see Tennyson’s house with neither lunch nor laurel. A lady at the next table was of service with directions, intermingling her remarks with bits of bacon to her Pekinese. She was a widow (herself, not the Pekinese) and had just leased a house on Black- down, and this was the very morning when she was to move in with trunk, bird-cage and all her furniture. “And an aspidistra?”’ suggested Bill. “Surely an aspidistra.”’ “Quite true,’ she answered. She was vastly entertained that we were Americans and she confided that the wealth of Europe had crossed the ocean. Openly she accused us of profiteering in the war's necessities, and yet with a friendly nibbling at her bacon that held no malice. Prosperity had fallen ourA DIVIDEND FOR GUINNESS Q77 way, as once it fell to England when Napoleon in the desolation of his campaigns closed the shops of Europe and England discovered steam to be its servant. “And what is the name of your dog?” asked Bull. “Tootsy!’’ she replied. “A lovely name,” said Bull. Seizing now our trusty alpenstocks we set out to climb Blackdown. ‘There were trequent signboards directing us to Tennyson’s house but we lost 1t In con- flicting paths. As we neared the top we issued from a shadowed lane into open fields of gorse and heather, and the view presently widened to the east and south. It seemed that most of Sussex and Surrey lay exposed, from Leith Hill upon the north marked by a solitary tower to the line of Downs against the sea. Below Bignor Beacon a patch of blue was the English Channel and further east rose the crown of trees at the top of Chanctonbury. And farther still the Downs were lost in mist toward Hastings. We saw the towers of Petworth and the ridge that blocked Chichester from sight. This is the Weald, a valley of meadow and woodland, tamed with village spires. But it is the eye of fancy that has the widest view from Blackdown. This windy country was the scene of six great invasions against this isle of Britain. In the eastern mist where the hills fall off to marshy land the Romans beached their triremes. And there they built Richborough as a base for further movement. Across this valley their legions cut their way, and a Briton standing the non Blackdown must have caught the sunlight on the polished studding of their shields.Se | 4 278 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY In this valley the Jutes broke the power of Rome. Here, for a third invasion, came the Holy Cross of St. Au- gustine and his hymns were the return of Latin power in more peaceful dress. And then the Saxons and the Danes! The Normans landed here, and theirs was the sixth invasion. And Wat Tyler started his revolution here. And although Napoleon never landed, every beacon top was piled with faggots to announce his sails upon the rim of narrow sea. These armies parade in the eye of fancy and the wind fetches up their martial tunes. And now on this sunny morning all across the sky white clouds pelted to the south: and they, it seemed, were a seventh attempt at conquest—a fleet of air in modern war, quite shattered by the high-range barrage of the hills. Yet still more vivid is the unseen vision of present English life. Village streets. although they hide among the trees, are marked by wall and tower, and men trafic on their errands with gossip of their crops and drought orrain. Kettles sing in kitchens, and there are secret gardens where tea is served behind a flowering hedge. From fields there rise the shouts of sport. Men jog upon the roads until the smoke of twilight leads them home. A man who climbs a hill is half a god, and the spacious world resides within the narrow lodging of his eye. ~ 1 am hungry,” said Bill, “my stomach bawls for food.”” But, as he could not move me from the scene, he led Beezer apart and gave him a singing lesson. I heard them at a distance—Beezer running up the scale with la, li, lo and loo. oe Ni gueemsn lmppeanr opener AS NSA REPRE enA DIVIDEND FOR GUINNESS 279 — I have read that a man does not love a mountain until he has rolled great stones from the top to hear them crash below, until he has staked his wit against a storm and battled for his life on dangerous cliffs. But Blackdown is no more than a hill and there were too many tourists on its slope. To the White Horse for Sunday dinner. I must now refer to the mightiest exploit of our trip. If you please, a sound of horns! The White Horse Inn at Haslemere shall be known hereafter because a mysterious stranger drank eighteen short pints of Dublin stout on Sunday afternoon in the garden and departed on Monday all restored. Is not a hotel at Llangollen still preserved im memory for the beer that Hazlitt drank as he read the Heloise? The Mermaid Tavern, the Boar’s Head, the Cheshire Cheese persist because famous fellows were the patrons of the tap. We mark with a tablet the solemn house where a great man died, but our thoughts dwell best by his tavern fire where his tongue ran free at midnight. The evil that men do—and so let it be with Bull! Bill has a habit of delaying his stout until the food is quite consumed. Then he reaches for his mug and, as now the foam has settled, he swishes the shrunken liquor roundabout, gazing at it with meditative eye. And this, if ever, is his braggart hour. Often, he remarked at Haslemere, often in his student days at Vienna he had drank great bumpers of beer without effect. “Quarts?” I asked. “Gallons!” he answered, and a wistful far-off lookSet eal 280 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY stole upon his eyes. He lifted again his pint of stout and as he swished it in a circle his gaze rested on its surface as on the crystal of the past where mighty deeds were written. ‘There were giants once—” J began. ~ Bah!” he answered. ‘This Dublin stout is child’s milk. It would not hurt a babe.” And so he boasted, to the shame of my own youth when a single beer drove me out for air. " Lhere was a man” I said, “who could leap—but only at Rhodes.” “I can still jump,” said Bill. I appraised the bottle. ‘How much does it hold?” I asked. » About three-quarters of a pint.” ~ Pll pay for sixteen bottles, if you will drink them in two hours.” ~ When?” said Bill in thirsty accent. “Now! In the garden.” And so it was arranged, with provision that when the clock struck, the last bubble must be gone and himself sober for a discourse of high phil osophy. We laid the matter before the landlord. Should Haslemere, we asked, be second to Vienna? Should these wooden walls of England yield the d: ay to German gukguk? He scratched his head and replied as a Briton should. He left us and, retiring to the cellar, returned with the announcement that he had counted his bottles and that they were sufficient to put the Teutons into shame. “Show me the garden!” demanded Bill.A DIVIDEND FOR GUINNESS 281 It was a spot of shadowed lawn, and an iron table stood behind a bit of shrubbery. Though a good tavern He replied as a Briton should needs no bush for its advertisement, an iron table on the contrary requires it as a shelter in the performance of such a deed as Bill’s.© —_—— wee ace aN, Tipe 282 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY ~ Lhe very place,” said Bill. “Fetch out the stout!”’ And so it was provided that sixteen bottles of Guin- ness were to be gathered into baskets from the cellar and deposited in a huge wheel upon the garden table with a pewter mug as axle. ~ Would you like a book to read?” I asked. ~ ll write postal cards to all my pupus,’”’ was Bill’s reply. Is it safe?” I asked. ~ You shall read them.” I think Id better,”’ I replied. Bill sucked his fountain pen full of ink, and the stately procession proceeded to the garden. The bottles were stationed at their posts where they stood like the pins of a mightier game of bowls to be knocked down by four o’clock. Time was called. Bill drew out a post card, addressed it “My dear Gladys,”’ drained a whole bottle in one del and the contest of the bet was started. Beezer walked out to see the town. iclous gulp, I slept for two hours and then, on the tick of time, I arose and re- paired to the garden to learn whether the heroic deed was done. Bill waved a hand as I approached. He stood up and skipped across the lawn, with a snatch of song, ““I’m an airman,” a tune from the Hastings vaudeville. His necktie had slipped beneath his ear and a smudge of ink was on his nose. But bottles strewed the turf, the post cards were written, the table was bare except for a puddle at the rim. ~ And now for high philosophy,” I started.A DIVIDEND FOR GUINNESS 283 “Phizolophy!” said Bill. “ Waz zhall we discuss? ”’ “No matter!” Ireplied. “I see your fitness.” Off he marched to bed, with a stiff adherence to rectilinear that dared not swerve. His bet was won. Dublin stout had been vanquished as easily as Vienna cukguk. The wooden walls of England were still safe. Haslemere stands hereaiter as an equal comrade to Llangollen where Hazlitt tipped his mug to Heloise, to the Mermaid and all the sacred taverns where once the poets drank with shouts of verse. Bill still rested from his Olympian effort through sup- per. Once I looked ‘n on him, but heard him gurgling as some deep dream of prowess crossed his sleep. So Beezer and I set out in the early evening to climb Hindhead. Our way led rather tamely past the village shops of gaudy trinkets—cheap jewelry to tempt a shillmg— past the railroad station, then turned up a shady road among pretty cottages and villas where rich folk from London spend their summers. There were boarding houses, too, with hot and cold laid on. In a half hour the road popped out from the trees and fell to be a wagon trail and then at last a path through shrub and heather, for a sweep of wind holds down the growth. This common is a place of crowds upon a holiday. The great road from London to Portsmouth circles below the crown of the hill and here idle folk loose a hamper from their motor and bear it to the top for a picnic lunch. From the hotels upon the slope it is a parade of an afternoon. Pet dogs sniff along the pathste eas = ee ee a i ne gt ee ene ee le arene pe 284 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY and children are at hide and seek among the heather. Lovers, too, walk arm inarm and kiss inopen boast to Mrs. Grundy. Nurse maids wheel their babies on these paths, and fat folk catch their breath with knees that are weak from climbing. And just below, the motor trate sweeps around the curve and honks a warning to the resorts upon the Channel that fires be lighted and beds be aired. But twilight folds the world in mist. The Jest of cock- ney entertainment sinks into the stillness of the night. The pulse of traffic skips a beat and dies away. The hotels flash but dimly in thethickened air. Tf lovers walk they tread a secret path, whispering of precious matters. For night is uncaptured by our advance. All day, like children in a nursery, we clutter the green carpet of the world with toys and call it progress. We set up little bridges and lay our metal tracks. We push a train about and clang a tiny bell. We mount block on block until a tower is built. But night sweeps bare our trivial occupation. Thick shadows come like grandsires to the hearth when games are done. The world, with shallow playthings laid away, is but a tumbled ridge of darkened mist held once more in the unconquered realm of night. There is a pillar at the top of Hindhead that marks an unforgotten murder, and here Beezer and I stood until stars were scattered in the sky. Lovers walked only on their secret paths. A smudge of lights was a village that went to bed. Hills had drawn a misty cover to their chin. There was silence except for the moaning of the wind, as if jt wandered in the blind contusion of the land and sought vainly its companions of the sea to make a drunken night of it.A DIVIDEND FOR GUINNESS 285 We were in bed when Bill tapped on the door. “Did I win the bet?” he asked in that kind of whisper that actors use for the persuasion of an upper gallery. There is a pillar at the top of Hindhead “You did,” I answered. “‘Go back to sleep!” “T want to sing the Air-man.” We admitted him. He carried three glasses and a bottle of stout. “Tt’s a hair of the dog,” he said, and he poured out a taste of it into each glass. And so we drank to his recovered health, and his footsteps faded down the hall. i 4 , aS | : | |"All right here?”’ he asked CHAPTER XXIX A SHORT DAY ENDING WITH A CHORUS ASLEMERE next morning went about its | business, evidently unaware of Bill’s mighty | contest with gukguk. Hindhead, also, returned | no doubt to dull suburban use, and meat and kippers were peddled as usual up to Blackdown. At breakfast the landlord inquired of Bill his health. ‘* Prime,” said Bill. The landlord rubbed his stomach. ‘All right here?” he asked. Child’s milk,” said Bill, “‘harmless to a babe.” i ‘You'll be sure to sign our book,” said the landlord. | 286A SHORT DAY ENDING WITH A CHORUS 287 “With pleasure,’ answered Bull. And so the record stands, and the inn is famous. We sauntered to the railway station, as this was the day when George was to come from London. From a posted sheet of trains we learned that expresses arrived every hour or so. One was presently coming in, sO we bought platform tickets to be close at hand. At these crowded stations one may look upon a train darkly as through a glass without expense, but if he would mix with the passengers and hotel runners on the platform he must procure a ticket with a penny in the slot. “He doesn’t seem to be aboard,” said Beezer, when the train had pulled away and the platform cleared. “Quite true, Rollo,” I replied. “I commend you on the clearness of your observation. Pink marshmallows are doubtless excellent brain food.”’ And now it was arranged that Beezer and I were to walk to Guildford and that Bill was to meet all trains for George and come on in a public bus. H they over- took us they were to alight for such part of the twelve miles as might be left. It was hard on noon when we fitted on our rucksacks. We lingered a bit at Greys Wood and I pointed out to Beezer the inn and the house of the Widow Winter where I had once put up on a cycling trip. Here were the steps where I had sat with the friendly chemist to boast of the versatility of American drug stores. Here was the path to the hilltop which I had climbed with the widow’s wagging dog. It seemed a homelike place, as villages must if one has passed the night and returns with seasoned recollection. ; i. By , | pas: i ' i , : 7 4 i . - F . ~ . — di nang eae et ee -anil inianatnatatalagtanimaa teats teats 288 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY We ate at the Brook Inn two miles beyond. It was a bank holiday and a crowd of hungry folk filled the dining room, with a rush of platters in the corridor. We ate in the sitting room, and this was the room where I had had my supper on this same cycling trip. Prosper- ity had swept away the older furniture and it was stuffed with chairs of shining leather. Grandfather’s crayon portrait which had stood upon an easel was now removed. I asked the waitress if she recalled four dusty travelers who came once at twilight and found all rooms full. One was a lad and he went by the name of Gingerale. Perhaps she remembered his attack on the bacon. But she met me with a vacant stare. Our lunch was bread and milk, with a slab of beef for Beezer. * Why,” I asked, “‘are English novels so full of food?” Beezer did not know. ~The persons of the older novelists are always eating. In Dickens alone there are a thousand dinners served. If a chapter lags a roast is fetched in. And why is this?” He had no answer. “How can such an output of words,” I continued, " arise from the monotony of beef and bacon, mutton, a sole, a boiled potato, a plate of string beans and a raspberry tart? French stories do not always cram themselves with cooking, Beezer, although their cook- ing delights the palate by its variety. It is at their kitchens that a sniff might justly start a sonnet.” “It’s not bad beef,” said Beezer, descending on his cow.A SHORT DAY ENDING WITH A CHORUS 289 “Tt is a noble animal,’ I answered, ““but much abused.”’ Presently Beezer pushed back his plate. “You are done,” I said. ‘“‘And now a pink marsh- mallow, and we'll be off.” ‘Have you a match?” he asked. “Here is the box,” I replied. “A tidbit of roast thumb, and then we'll start.” ““Cue,”’ said Beezer. As we walked on through the afternoon Beezer and I played a game, with motors as its counts. A car that advanced upon us was a score for him, and to me fell the motors that passed us from the rear. A bicycle was half a point. It was thus that we debauched our minds. At Godalming a cycling club went by and he scored his triumphant goal. I did remark to him, how- ever, that somewhere hereabouts stood the Charter- house School, that once it had occupied a building in London hard by Smithfield and that Thackeray had been a student there. And so we walked along the river Wey until the hill at Guildford popped in sight. We sat for a ginger beer at the entrance of the town, then sought the Lion Hotel. At dinner time Bill and George arrived by bus. George, of course, was a reinforcement to the dis- cussions of music. Beezer at once fastened on him, and pumped him dry with questions. Was Sir Henry Wood the equal of our own Sokoloff who has played in London? And how often was the Ring performed? George, moreover is convulsed by Bill. “You'll kill me, Bill!” he cries, ““you and your stout.”—_——_— ee 290 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY ‘Food for babes,” says Bill. Nor have I met men of pleasanter temper than these three for a walking trip. Bill's itinerant drug store (see catalogue made at Brighton!) is George’s constant jest. ~ Well,” he says at breakfast, “have you had your morning Turpo?”’ ‘’ Never travel without it.” “What's it for,” asks George, “the gizzard or the face?” ~The feet,”’ says Bill. “And the Kora Konia? I hope that it has not been neglected.” ‘Most certainly not,” says Bill. ‘* Houbigant pour le teint?”’ Every night,” says Bill. ‘You'll be the death of me,”’ George exclaims. ‘‘Did ever a man go on a walking trip so loaded down?” “Lift the box,” says Bill. ‘“‘Not an ounce above two pounds. Handiest little thing in the world. Been to Europe with me eleven times.”’ “It will go in your coffin yet. What’s the cork for?” “A museum specimen,” says Bill. ‘‘I come from a dry land.” ‘What do you do with the atomizer?” It’s Listerine,” says Bill. “It keeps germs out of my throat. Open your mouth!” George obeys. **Now, Beezer!” Beezer obeys. wee “Yours!A SHORT DAY ENDING WITH A CHORUS 291 “T’ll be damned if I will,” I answer. We spent the evening at the Theater Royal where we saw a performance of the “Veterans of Variety, the Famous and Original, Previous to their World’s Tour.” Chief of them was Tom Costello who looked vaguely familiar as if 1 had seen him once at Poli’s in New Haven in the days when George Felsburg was the orchestra. A Miss Marie Collins of the Collins family was famous for “‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.”” T. W. Barret was announced as ‘““The One and Only. The Oldest Comedian on Any Stage.” And there was a queen of burlesque who had frisked in the roaring nineties, of tired eyes now and drooping mouth when her silly act was done. These stars blinked in a great constellation on chairs arranged in a circle, and before each act Costello made a speech in which he deplored the present sunk condition of the stage in its comparison to the better days that went before. Every one of his actors had been rescued from a shabby boarding house. Each one of them sang the song that had made him famous years before. During the early stages of the entertainment the oldest comedian alive had rested for an hour in complete detachment with chin buried in his collar and with now and then a dab at his rheumy eyes. Occasion- ally when an act was done he clapped his thumbs to- gether to express approval and then sunk again to lethargy. When his turn came it was announced that “eighty frosty winters have not dulled old Barret’s heart or legs”; and then he rose and performed in un- certain balance the last echo of a dance. The show : 2 rr a, a a Er ee eee ee ee ad eat OT eee aaa292 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY \ : ia Sh : \ closed with a solo by Tom Costello, and all the others | stood up and joined him in the chorus, “‘Comrades, ie ' | 4 +i | : ' } ae | ; iM wens LB iy ind nt i hi domed ) Sia ar Me His actors had been rescued from a shabby boarding house comrades, ever since we were boys,’ which he had : made famous many years before. | If the audience showed no enthusiasm it was atA SHORT DAY ENDING WITH A CHORUS 298 least respectful in a sodden sort of way, without the hootings that the performance deserved. And this, I think, is a quality of English theater patrons. If ever a variety actor has entertained them, they will let him grow old and stiff upon their stage and will hold him lukewarm at least in their regard. A tradition is stronger than fresh appraisal. Like an aspidistra, though it be worn and dusty without a ereener leaf, these old actors linger on in the recollec- tion of their better days. The music halls of London are filled with performers who have lost their teeth and legs, yet their acts meet with applause and they still are headlined. A stranger will be perplexed by this and he will wonder how a wrinkled lady who sings coquettishly in fat tights can secure such an easy encore. And when at last the palaces of Leicester Square are closed against her, then she visits her artistic sins upon the provinces to the third and fourth generations of those who loved her. When Tom Costello’s chorus had been sung we mustered to great applause. I can only hope, in mercy to themselves, that these veterans of variety do not display themselves in America on their trip around the world. As we came out of the theater a man in front of us fell down in a faint or fit, and the crowd held back so that he might be carried to the air. “Ts -ra-ra-boom-de-ay was too much for him,” said George. It was the old lady in pink tights,” added Bill. We were at some trouble to gain entrance to the —— ~—= Pp 2 ' ee ele P od ll a le ee apa y a err en Ne294 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY hotel. The door was locked and, after much ringing, a surly porter put his head out through the grill. ‘*’The bar is closed,”’ he said. ‘We want no drink,” said Bill. ‘“‘ We area little band of peripatetic philosophers (the School of Socrates from the grove named Acdemus), traveling for our instruc- tion. Here is a shilling which you may spend in riot.” “Cue,” said the porter. He admitted us, and we fell to bed.— Sf wera oe A great clock that swings above the street CHAPTER XXX A LONG DAY IN WHICH I CLIMB LEITH HILL ND now from Guildford our course lies east, par- allel to the Pilgrims’ Way until by Saturday a we shall come to Canterbury where our trip will be accomplished. I was up early to see Guildford Castle, but the others preferred an extra hour of sleep. The castle stands on 295é siteniereeeneniniianieeinnticacaapemsaas paces ee em. pee” 296 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY a little hill inside the town and is surrounded by a park that climbs the slope. No more than the Norman keep is left, and it is too crowded by houses for a suffi- cient view, too small to be of much consequence and beauty. It may have been once a temporary residence of royalty, for there was hunting all about, but it never stood assault and its annals are of meager interest. Castlesand women! Their romance lies in the endurance of asiege. But as all castles have their gossip of violent days there is a legend that once in Saxon times, Alfred son of Ethelred landed in Kent with a company of Normans. This was taken as an act of insurrection to recover his father’s crown, and he was captured, tor- tured and put to death in Guildford together with five hundred of his attendants. Henry the Second made a royal park at Guildford and built a palace, but this is entirely swept away, although grain is supposed to show still a different color on the lines of its foundation. King John kept Christmas once at Guildford. All of the Edwards came and several Henrys. Elizabeth traveled hereabouts by coach until the county protested at the sum that her horses cost the district. And Guildford is the scene of a novel by Martin Tupper—*Stephan Langton’’—and I bought it laterina shop and tried to read it. I had thought of Tupper only as the author of “Proverbial Philosophy,” which used to be bound in ooze leather and left forever on parlor tables all round Boston as a proof of culture. It was about forty years ago that the castle erounds came into the possession of the city corporation and aI CLIMB LEITH HILL 297 premium was offered for the best suggestion how a park might be made of it. One of these plans offered a hint that “the ugly ruin in the center > should be demolished and in place of it there should be erected “‘an iron band stand painted green, picked out with gold.” Happily the offer was rejected. Guildford was a usual halt of Mr. Pepys on his journeys of business down to Portsmouth. He records that in the garden of his mn he cut ‘“‘sparagus for supper—the best that ever Late... .” And again he remarks that in a bet he won a quart of sack “‘trying who could go best over the edge of an old fountain well’? whatever that may mean. And Jane Austen who lived near by at Chawton sometimes shopped at Guildford. “. . . Very lucky in my gloves”’ she writes ‘“__»ot them at the first shop I went to, though I went into it rather because 1t was near than because it looked like a shop, and gave only four shillings for them; aiter which everybody at Chawton will be hoping and predicting that they cannot be good for anything.” Anyone who has motored through Guildford has observed a great clock that swings from the Town Hall above the street. In sixteen eighty-three when the Hall was built a certain John Aylward, a clock maker, came to Guildford to engage business. But the guild refused permission, so he set up his shop outside the borough where he built this clock. He presented it to the Corporation, which so sweetened. its disposi- tion that he was given the freedom of the town. We were on the road by ten o’clock and struck south a mile or so to Shalford. It was here, if tradition is cor- | tee = .pe era is 298 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBUR Y rect, that Bunyan located his Vanity Fair; for the Pilgrims’ Way runs near the town and a great fair had been kept since the middle ages. It covered more than a hundred acres and its booths are supposed to have been placed in the meadows north of the town below st. Catherine’s Chapel. It has been hinted that the Delectable Mountains were the rim of Sussex Downs, and that the Slough of Despond was the marshy land of Shalford Common, Anyway Bunyan lived for a time at Guildford and then in a cottage on the com- mon. During this residence it seems likely that he wandered among the gaudy trading of the booths. » Chen I saw in my Dream,” he wrote, “that when they were got out of the Wilderness, they presently saw a Town before them, and the name of that Town is Vanity; and at the Town there is a Fair kept, called Vanity Fair: it is kept all the year long; it beareth the name of Vanity Fair, because the Town where ’tis kept us Lighter than Vanity; and also because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is Vanity. of the wise, all that cometh 7s Vanity.” As we entered Shalford we passed the church and [ saw the decayed remnant of the village stocks. And, as if the days of Bunyan were not wholly passed, I picked up from the pavement a leaflet of a revival urging all to come to God. But somewhat beyond the center of the town a tavern looked out across the com- mon in shrewder invitation toward a fleshly life. “Aha!” cried Bill, and he fumbled with the straps of his rucksack, “I find it in my heart to sit at stout that I may meditate upon the scene.”’ As is the sayingI CLIMB LEITH HILL 299 Open broken land stretched to the south marked by convenient paths and here | prefer to think the Fair was held. I cast about for the Slough of Despond and was rewarded by finding a marshy bit of ground close by the road. Certainly Christian, if he had not been lost in meditation, could have steered around it with- out disaster. Far off against the south arose the misty horizon of the Delectable Mountains. We argued whether in such a pious place it would be proper to apply at the tap and fall among thirsty sinners; but on inquiry we found we were out of hours and the bar was closed. Beyond Shalford we saw St. Martha’s Chapel on a hill, famous in pilgrim days. This chapel and St. Catherine’s nearer Guildford were supposed to have been built by two sisters. They had only one hammer, but as magic was common in those days, first one sister drove a nail then hurled the hammer to the other who drove a nail. And so, turn and turn about they worked, tossing the hammer back and forth across the hill. In four miles, near Albury where Martin Tupper wrote his “Stephan Langton,” a novel of murder and many swoonings, we turned a few paces from the highroad to see the Silent Pool; for a dozen persons had warned us not to miss it. Its waters, so they said, lie so snugly in a wooded hollow that even in the wind its surface stays as glass. In the very name there had sounded something of Keats—a silent pool where Endymion may once have slept, ‘“full of sweet dreams, and health and quiet breathing” —where maidens came to bathe at dawnaaa aeons ee on peep ss 800 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERB URY and the creatures of the tempest paused to catch their Image in the dark unruffled water. And so I hoped that there might be a lurking presence in the hollow— the shadow of pleasant ghosts that haunt a poet’s dream. Have I not said that spirits dwell on the hills about Killarney and that the heard when a cloud falls upon the moon? tains that tower above a southern |] forever ir step is The moun- ake are the prison walls of a thousand years of song that pack the night with echoes. What quality resides in quiet waters that it contains these mild specters of the past? E we approached the Silent Pool. “I don’t see much in this,” said Beezey ', When we had pushed through a gate and stood beside the water. For our fancy had run too high and the lake was a disappointment. agerly as Was Inevitable In its state of nature An upper pool runs t deeply in the trees But a pavilion had ied upon the planking and the paths were worn with pienics. ~ Look!”’ said Bill, “There is a bottle lying at the bottom.” it must have been of rare beauty. off to one below, and both are se which shield it from the storm. been built with names scratc] ~ Stout?” asked George. ~ Bless my soul, it is. I think better of the spot,” said Bill. “Its patrons are persons of good taste.” The pool’s better days were lived before the char-a- bane soiled the hig] roads, and even now a band of restless tourists sought out an empty space of bark to carve their names. We had lunch at Shere a mile to the east, a villageI CLIMB LEITH HILL 301 famed as one of the loveliest in Surrey. Its street is lined with thatched cottages, and the by-lane to the ‘nn crosses a stream of swift and shallow current. Water of more tranquil temper would linger here in lodging for the night, for on its whole progress to the sea, it will find no village of such pleasant ease. Le It was at Shere that I demanded a change of diet. I had eaten so long cold beef and mutton for my lunch | that I feared my speech would turn to a moo and bah. So [ asked the waitress for four slices of dry toast— today’s toast, not a stale remnant of yesterday—toast that did not harden in a cooler, but was folded in a napkin— and also a great saucer and a pitcher of hot milk. She gave me a shrewd look to see whether I were in my senses. In all the years that she had served no one had rejected their English beef. I met her eye with a stony glance and she yielded. Sir Toby in the play confessed that he was a great eater of meat, and if his carnal prowess showed in England he must have been a giant among the giants. George, meantime, stared at me in amazement. “You don’t mean to say that’s all your lunch,” he asked. “Tt is,’ I answered. “You'll be faint. There is no nourishment in it. Beef makes strength.” “And rheumatism,” I added. “That’s the trouble with England. Too much meat. Three times a day! Pounds of it!” And I laid a bet with him that I would outlast him through the afternoon even if he swallowed a whole ; oa ~ a ee eel “eSa cap ~restaenasinge see sengenaitatan ot ae cementing nig te 302 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY cow, feet and ears and tail. I thought that he and the waitress winked together in agreement that a fool must have his way. Shere is delightful. The inn sets back from the highroad on a quiet square. The hurrying motorist will see the thoroughfare only and he will signal to his driver to ease the speed, but it will be too late for a glimpse of stream. The houses rise from the sidewalk and each of them offers a window into clean snug living. ‘There are gates everywhere suggestive of gar- dens, of kitchen walls for homely vegetables, of flow- ering shrubs and paths that end at the tinkle of the stream. Not long since I lunched with two or three fellows of my own craft who meditated on the plots of novels. One of them had spent his winter in Lenox Library on Fifth Avenue compiling a book on old New York. And he was fed up—I quote his very slang to show how authors slump when out of hours—fed up with the noises of the city. Where, he asked, was there an English village in which one might rent a room for a month of summer—a spot with charming walks about, an inn near by for gossip after supper, a window where a table and an inkpot might be set with a tranquil view both up and down the street? And so for his purpose I now offer him this town of Shere. And not Shere alone! Up the stream from Arundel, hard by Amberley Castle, he might pitch upon some thrifty widow with empty lodging whose windows glance upon a garden. Skiffs are moored by the river’s grassy brink, and the ebb and flow of tide will ease hisra sett « I CLIMB. LEITH HILL 308 progress up or down. He may float even with the cur- rent until the turning of the water bears him home. D Yo ar ae, re aL eu } <7, ° VIR ee - ithe i wa we ed al ec an ee Oe ne ee ee eel eee eee ne ve pee ae ?, y Ore af ; | i \ | i i a] bi MAE naff Bid = ‘ £a) Me CLAY is ee Soy WF ies SS . - \ . 4 rh eS INS a TR bal RR ) \ ee N xi Vv Wd :. yi a fe os f \ Ale Y > Pah Pa eh 7 nd D BY ae i i , 4 wt mh WAM A i US } FX ! | J == ‘4 } I a I now offer him this town of Shere He may sit with a pad upon his knee on the stone seats of Amberley Castle where sheep nibble at the turf, and: - a Le eaee —— —_—_ ge eee 304 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY here if anywhere his pen will change from prose to a flight of rhyme. ~ When I write my novel,” said Bill, “I’ll take a sunny room at the Mermaid Inn at Rye—the room that holds the legend of Elizabeth, although the four- post bed will be too short and I’ll bargain for a longer couch. I’ll moon around the streets and pry out the old corners of antiquity, or sit for an hour of twilight on the esplanade and look for the winking lights of France.” ~ If you see the lights of France” said George, “‘it will be a damned clear night.” ~ When I write my novel,”’ Bill replied, “it will be a damned foggy night.” ~ Bill, you'll be the death of me,” said George, and in his laughter he jounced like a man who rides a trot- ting horse. ~ At Bodiam,” Bill continued, “‘I’ll write a play of Pomfret-Dawken, with a great climax in which the Duchess stuffs her through the battlement.” ‘With a splash of real water?” asked Beezer. ‘It shall be arranged,” said Bill. Or, if an author follows the advice of Hilaire Belloc, he will choose a village in a fold of the South Downs and, when his work is done, he will seek the wind upon the hills to blow the cobwebs from his mind. But he will be wisest if he scorns precise advice and centers at any town of Surrey, Sussex or southern Kent, and walks here and there for discovery of his own; for what we find ourselves is always sweetest. We left Shere shortly after lunch and, by the middleI CLIMB LEITH HILL 305 of the afternoon, we were fatigued and sat for rest beside the road to the west of Wotton. Dorking was our objective for the night and it was another hour otf walking. But here a road branched south on a great circle to the top of Leith Hill—an extra distance of seven miles. I asked George whether his slab of beef would endure so far. He smiled wanly at this onslaught of my milk and toast. Nor did Bill or Beezer jump to the added task. So I left them by the roadside and went alone. All day we had been upon a highroad with its roar of frequent motors, but this was a quieter way beyond the noise. Once I overtook a group of Englishmen with packs upon their shoulders. They too were bound for Leith Hill and were lost without a map, so I lent them mine for study. They were cockney and went with a rheu- matic dawdle that I left behind. A cyclist, next, had missed a corner road, and I set him right. Presently a fine mist fell and I hoisted my umbrella and strode up- hill. It was now rough country of pine and open gorse and heather; and this is the charm of England, for the soft verdure of the valleys yields its kingdom to the harsh rule of wind on the upper slopes. It seems as if nature, knowing the island’s cramped dimensions, had packed variety as close as possible. Or shall we say that England is a shop of many samples to be sold at retail, never in vast bulk—a bit of valley, a dainty box of hills—all displayed on near- by shelves? Can one who journeys on the Devon moors believe that the softer lines of Somerest are near? One puts on his boots in a meadow by the Thames to i 1 FP i i 8 Bl 5 | a Bi * ‘ + ae * : x "7 eet ees el ee ii aSe cerca em rE of Pi MBA) ow esau NS” hi Ay ie af i, li ake se Mi | ! Nahe Y Nh MRNA OR 7 Se iH hi) it ( tim VM TSR AF SS ieee | HAN cane Le a ae Lace) |) pata || Ne Ae Ae deal |i nea ; Hal IB Pt SAW SLSL EMS ite RET EAU EN Mh | We Seal eC aE ety i rp NH Sor EB Bh ge ee A UC MM , Uh /) z ae Seta A Ww Ce oud : NA Lk AAae My J recess bch ao — | oa = A y YG m i oo—x KY yf Ay Se — Soe cs 4 Ar SSE = Alf eo SS -: = ~ en ——— ia. fo SSS Ror oo : = nana << — —————_ —— — —_—_—> <=> tl — es —————— So SJLUL9 OCONE Feoay Its suggestion of spacious days to lunch or set a destination without the outlay of too long a day. If I might choose favorite towns, where most of them are beautiful, I would select Rye for its Mermaid Inn, its steep streets, its range of antique houses, sky-blue doors where artists work, its esplanade where one can watch the ships upon the Channel. I would name Arundel for its park, its poetic lake, the towers that show above the trees. Midhurst might gain my E ’ 4 i | i { fa if i Te Satan. sy - o a + Msp a en eee in ae eel ‘liter: tmp alge One ape336 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY suffrage for the mighty oaks above the golf course of its park, for the tangle of deep woods and the forgotten avenue where once a princess slept. And Shere wins a vote for its ease, its thatched roofs, its retirement from the highroad. Nor may Sevenoaks go unpraised for the glories of Knole, its suggestion of spacious days, its inn and the garden of flowering hedge. I could spend a week at Bodiam and waste my idle mornings by the lake watching the slow curl of water among the lily pads. And there are villages in the valleys of the Downs which I would wish to see again, to pass my days upon the windy hills where cows and sheep pursue their eternal dinner. Penshurst and Chiddingstone, Pevensey and Haslemere. ~ And what will you call this book you write?” asked Bill. “That is the difficulty,” I replied. Whereupon I went alone and tried twenty titles to learn if one would fit. I returned without decision. What” said Bill, ““have you selected?” ‘Pilgrims to Canterbury. Wouldthat do?” Iasked. “It is a theft,” he answered. “A Path of English Villages,” I tried again. “It is too much like a title you have used before.” **And so it is,” I answered. ‘*How would it do” asked Beezer, “‘to name it A Journey Among the Bacon Eaters?” ‘Not at all,” I replied. “Sore Feet in England?” he persisted. ‘Might I not call the book” I asked, “‘The Storage of October?”THREE TRAMPS IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND _ 387 “What does it mean?” “Tt means that in autumn I shall draw upon my memory to write it.” ‘But will anyone, before he makes his purchase, know what the title is about?” asked Bull. “Probably not,” I answered. “If only the youngster were a child, it would be so easy. I would call a girl Katharine; a boy Richard, so that he might be nick- named Dick.”’ There was silence, then a flash crossed Bill’s face. “What is it?” I asked. “T have it,” he cried. ‘‘Three Tramps in Southern England.” “T hoped you might do better,” I replied. “There is something dirty about atramp. I must think again.” From this we fell to a discussion of the names of books, and of their authors’ shrewdness or stupidity in the christening of them. Musicians have the better of it, for they put merely a number to their opus.—— ea PI gemma 2am oo Se /? ( f f fie i ii ik i | CE EE hdeeeieh a ae T TT oo : 4 SJMern FLO RY UTE OS She stood there always like a horse inside a stall CHAPTER XXXV A CANTERBURY PILGRIM S befits a pilgrim I was up at an early hour. I packed on tiptoe. I stole to the door. A dim knowledge of my departure was recorded in Beezer’s grunts, but he did not waken. Save for those who slept, the hotel was empty. The landlady was not yet behind her wicket, although I had thought she stood there always like a horse inside a stall. My footsteps echoed in the deserted rooms. The old gentleman in the furious shirt who had served our dinner was not yet abroad. At first I was deluded with the hope that the cook might be waddling by her stove and that she might stir me up a cup of coffee. I pushed open the kitchen’s swinging door and was greeted by a pile of unscraped dishes. Soapy pan and rag had not 338A CANTERBURY PILGRIM 389 held her to a task last night when Tommy Meighan played. What should a pilgrim do? Rouse the house to demand a breakfast? Surely the Wife of Bath would not have started lean upon a journey. No woman who has had five husbands and wears scarlet stockings on a mule would be content to travel on an empty stomach. The Franklin, too, it is recorded, loved at morning his sop of wine. Such taste proves an easy breakfast and a tardy start. Yet the Pardoner 1s written as a man of gentle temper and he, at least, must often have journeyed light. So him I made my pattern and, tightening my belt, I set upon my way. I had arranged with Beezer to pay for my lodging, yet I seemed athief as I tiptoed through the lobby to the street. Housewives, as I went, were dusting at their windows or striking a mop upon the sill. A grocer took down his wooden shutters to show the trade his shriveled apples. A butcher hung out a leg of mutton. At the top of the street a signpost informed me that Canterbury was distant twenty-eight miles. In a half hour I had left the last houses of the city, and here I saw a woman sweeping the whitened steps of aroadsidetavern. Thesesteps get astrict attention even from slovens who permit a litter in the tap. A smoke rose from the chimney with hint of eggs and bacon, so I advanced to tell my plight. She was cordial to the thought, so I went inside. And while the necessary clutter engaged the stove I sat in the disordered bar. Then I took to the road again, singing the kind of tune that a contented cargo knows. : | i f : . | - 2 E - ns 5 a , t 4 . ae ae ee rk eee aaanes: aines mniemminasin tt ater aaa ee ae 340 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY The day had now cleared the country of its early mist and had swept it into hollows where it lay like stranded puddles when the tide runs out. And to walk in England of an early summer morning before the sun has dried the hills is to see a world of green wrapped in translucent gray that rests softly on the sense. So far I had followed a solitary road; but, as I advanced, a patter of motors overtook me, the first drops of a storm of travel. For it was Saturday and this was the highroad from London to Dover, to Canter- bury and the Isle of Thanet where crowds gather at the week-end. In an hour or so I passed Leeds Castle, and I stood a bit for the prospect of its towers across ameadow. The river Len flows through the park and widens to a moat. In medieval days the castle was a stronghold of Kent. It was the property of the Queens of England until the days of Edward VI. I wavered whether I might spend an hour in exploration, but the itch of speed was on me and I turned my face to the east and hurried on. And so through Lenham, with the Pilgrims’ Way a half mile across the lowland to the north. My own road was of broad macadam, banked at the turns so that motors might run fast. By noon I had come to Charing, about thirteen miles from Maidstone. It was at Charing that a certain Mary Waters lived who, although she was possessed of but a meager family of sixteen children, had yet a total of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren that ran in her lifetime to three hundred and sixty-seven. For forty-seven years she lived a widow, which mustA CANTERBURY PILGRIM S41 have been a cruel blow to her ambition to break all records. Had she taken a second husband she could have gathered at a family party half the county round her. But Thomas Fuller lists also among his Worthies A . a O mA a —_- ti a) a = ua: s Sy Ui Co CT a bs a7 “. ——_——— 5 p ry A PS L *. aa) c 5 5 ’ ho c > a H J s, \ Md) : a / 4 ‘ \ i : a - : le We =ARE SS ios ara 4 i if \ tH i A ") | } F " f} ‘ * A Ht ; r P 'y P | u \ % : it A H i 1 " N iy 0 v= oe i a —_ i) — ‘ i] Pee ey, JF a Pa i A er | {4-2 “ae | A “ Wi Ae fh Oi / Wil: per Mi HT BA Nias as i MM ipl 1! LRRTV I i eae Yonder are the towers of Canterbury valley and of town. Tavern and ocean, church and hill! I have spread them all before you. Darkness leans against my window and scratches at the casement. There comes a memory of lands beyond the sea, where346 ROUNDABOUT TO CANTERBURY three men walked and worshiped at the shadowed shrine of Thomas. As nights grow cold our memory of June quickens into life, and the frosty storage of October preserves in recollection the moons of August and the verdure of the hills. A wind is loose tonight and in the rustling of leaves across the lawn I hear the shouts of summer, its chance and venture, its song and frolic of the night, and those sober voices, also, which lay a shadow in the pattern.RS ya od “= = am ‘ ah Pee OE , Ser eer ed ae » gn ae nS ee AR tes RO ee Pe [yee Ne ae res ee ee Pee Se ee ee ee er eee Tees a nN 7 1 p RA Te ae ee Se ay I NT Pe I TORihibe perp ee eR Oe ee aad a ee ee ne re en ay le ee ee 4 33 a 7 Toa SS a og ee ey Pee ee Ya a Wake ae ees Be pete. ee ee ee eee eesPX OOO 311 b4e po ee Ves ee Ny eae A en Ot ae ee ee a 0 ae ee ee mr Ff ee eee 7 " - Pe ae es Ar Bs ee ee ee 5 Wyieen ee eee ee eee ee Di awa aren ; Pe | is pS re ES eae Se ET teat eS am ne ee ees‘LEITH Hike, » = , ie -_ a AY Wy ™ J gees i y ft Ld ie |Psy a et > - oer eee — sae ed aoe ~ - ae me eT Ngee Sal ets see oe oe ee hae eer m v3 a ae BN 3 ioe See RGR Gp ls 2a eta Nats sae es hs Ne See asl ak Saas frei SITE UNE ano Tg a a "ing ' 7) tiny an a a e , ed aa anu aay? ig ral a - ny } ‘ * * epee on as bi : Fay “a 4 Oro he i ie aul Be ried c-Si Rs bind ra Pe q BER! he § et Mt ON a Fa hs pe e -] bi ay ‘oe il ie on end a ars ak, We s wr °; ora f 4 id beat wee ee Pe 2 | 4 aot ma ree Ree ed Es a Gane a ps Pe Siege eee orn Bae me Sot PRE a Piyciey Ay Gee ba ba as #4 3h: fe aT PTE et yeaa Hie Or cena tee ee ey ort go eas na a, Eon ae ees ny Tee ee ee ee a - ~ — E - oe Pins gh a oat EO AE PRO ee ee eke ele Se ee , Pa ee eae tad pe Giok es Seg ae pee fa SR ee ny fae a Ren i eee ae a a ae) ee