Set in Silver
always thought I could not love a woman who amused herself by slumming,
any more than I could love one who eagerly patronized bull-fights.
Thomas Hardy's work is too near Nature's heart to appeal to Mrs. Senter,
and too clever for my good sister Emily, who will read no author,
willingly, unless he calls a spade a pearl-headed hatpin. But Ellaline,
strange to say, has been allowed to read him. Evidently French schools
are not what they once were; and she and I particularly wanted to go
through Dorchester (his Casterbridge) even though we could see nothing
of Hardy's place, Max Gate, except its tree-tops. A pity more English
towns haven't made boulevards of their earthworks (since there are
plenty that have earthworks), planting them with chestnuts and
sycamores, as Dorchester has cleverly done. It was an idea worthy of a
"Mayor of Casterbridge." We lingered a bit, in the car, picking out
"landmarks" of resemblance to the book, and there were plenty. You know,
there's a magnificent Roman amphitheatre near by; but did we stay to
look at it? My friend, we are motorists! And it happened to be a grand
day with the car, which, though still very new, has "found" itself.
"Apollo" seemed a steed of "pure air and fire; and the dull elements of
earth and water never appear in him." He chafed against stopping, and I
humoured him gladly.
"Strange," said Ellaline, yesterday, "how a person will pay lots of
money to buy a motor-car, and go tearing about the world at great
expense, to gratify two little black or blue holes in his face; and
then, instead of letting the holes thoroughly absorb his money's worth,
he will rush past some of the best things on earth rather than 'spoil a
run.'" But she doesn't take the intoxication of ozone into consideration
in this indictment.
Our road was of the best, and always interesting, with some fine distant
views, and here and there an avenue of trees like a vast Gothic aisle in
a cathedral. "We could see things so nicely if it weren't for the
mists!" sighed Emily, who, if her wish had been a broom, would have
ruthlessly swept away those lacy cobwebs clinging to the hill-sides.
"Why," replied Ellaline, "you could see a bride's face more clearly if
you took away her veil, but it's the prettiest thing about her." That
put my feelings in a nutshell. England would be no bride for me if she
threw away her veil; and nowhere did it become her more than in Dorset,
Somerset, and Devon, where it is threaded with gold and embroidered with
jewels toward the edge of sunset.
Of course, there's only the most fanciful dividing line between Somerset
and Devon, yet I imagine the two counties different in their attributes,
as well as in their graces. Surely in Somerset the Downs are on a
grander scale. Between two of them you are in a valley, and think that
you see mountains. In Devonshire you have wider horizons, save for the
lanes and hedges, which do their best to keep straying eyes fastened on
their own beauty.
I suppose men who never have left England take such beauty for granted,
but to me, after the flaunting luxuriance of the East, it is enchanting.
I notice everything. I want someone, who cares for it as I do, to admire
it with me. If it weren't for Dick Burden this England would be making
me twenty-one again.
You should see, to understand me, all the lovely things fighting
sportively for supremacy in these Devonshire hedges; the convolvulus
pretending to throttle the honeysuckle; the honeysuckle shaking creamy
fists in the faces of roses that push out, blushing in the starlight of
wild clematis, white and purple. Such gentle souls, these Devonshire
roses! Kind and innocent, like the sweet, sentimental "Evelinas" of
old-fashioned stories, yet full of health, and tingling with buds, as a
young girl with fancies.
Devonshire seems to express herself in flowers, as sterner counties do
in trees and rocks. Even the children one meets playing in the road are
flowers. They are to the pretty cottages what the sweetbriar is to the
hedges; and no background could be daintier for the little human
blossoms than those same thatched cottages with open, welcoming doors.
Ellaline, fascinated by glimpses through open doors--(old oak dressers
set with blue and white china; ancient clocks with peering moon-faces;
high-backed chairs; bright flowers in gilt vases on gate-legged tables,
all obscurely seen through rich brown shadows)--says she would like to
live in such a cottage with somebody she loved. Who will that somebody
be? I constantly wonder. I should think less of her if it could be Dick
Burden, or one of his type, yet Mrs. Senter hints that the girl likes
his society. _Can_ she?
We had a picnic luncheon on our way to Sidmouth, lingering rather long
(once you have stopped your motor, nothing matters. If you're happy, you
are as reluctant to go on as you are to stop when going). Then, as they
all wished to travel by moonlight, I suggested that dinner also should
be a picnic. We bought food and drink at Honiton, and the country being
exquisite between there and Sidmouth, we soon found a moss-carpeted,
tree-roofed dining-room, fit for an emperor. Nearby glimmered a sheet of
blue-bells, like a blue underground lake that had broken through and
flooded the meadow. Ellaline said she would like to wash her face in it,
as if in a fairy cosmetic, to make her "beautiful forever." I really
don't believe she knows that would be superfluous trouble! And a fairy
godmother has given her the gift of song. I wish you could hear her
sing, Pat. I have heard her only once; but if I hadn't been a fool
already, I'd have become one then, beyond recall.
So we sat there, on the still, blue brink of twilight, till the moon
rose red as a molten helmet, and cooled to a silver bowl as she sailed
higher, dripping light. But tell me this: Would I think of such similes
if I weren't like a man who has eaten hasheesh and filled his brain with
a fantastic tumult--a magical vision of romance, such as his heart never
knew in its youth, never can know except in visions, now that youth has
passed? There's joy as well as pain in the vision, though, I can tell
you, as there must be in any mirage. And it was in a mirage of moonlight
and mystery that we took up our journey again, after that second picnic,
swooping bird-like, from hill to valley, on our way to the Knoll Park
Hotel.
It's an historic place, by the way, with an interesting past--once it
was a country house belonging to an eccentric gentleman--and at present
it is extremely ornamental among its lawns and Lebanon cedars.
As for Sidmouth the town, you have but to enter it to feel that you are
walking in a quaint old coloured lithograph--one of the
eighteenth-century sort, you know, that the artist invariably dedicated,
with extravagant humility, to a marquis, if he didn't know a duke!
There's no architecture whatever. As far as that is concerned, children
might have built the original village of Sidmouth as they sat playing on
the beach; but the queer cottages, with their low brows of
mouse-coloured thatch, protruding amid absurd battlements, have a
fantastic charm. They are most engaging, with their rustic-framed
bow-windows, like surprised-looking eyes in spectacles; their green
veranda-eyebrows, and their smiling, yellow-stucco faces, with low
foreheads. The house where Queen Victoria stopped as a little girl is a
great show place, of course, and is like a toy flung down against a
cushiony hillside, a battlemented doll's house, forgotten by the child
who let it fall, while big trees grew up and tried to hide it.
Two cliffs has Sidmouth, and an innocent esplanade, and--that is about
all, except the toy town itself. But it's a place to stay in. A happy
man would never tire of it, I think. An unhappy one might prefer
Brighton--or Monte Carlo. I am neither one nor the other. So I prefer a
motor-car. We are on the wing again to-morrow.
I must now go to our sitting-room, which looks over the sea, and play a
rubber of bridge with Mrs. Senter, Emily, and Burden. Ellaline doesn't
play.
Hope I haven't bored you with my Burden, and other complaints.
Yours ever,
Pen.
_Later, August 2nd, Night_
I have opened my letter again, to tell you what came of that rubber of
bridge.
I've lost--all the glamour. The reaction after the hasheesh has set in.
We didn't play long. Just that one rubber, and before we finished
Ellaline had taken her copy of "Lorna Doone" upstairs to her own room,
without interrupting our game for a good-night. She didn't think we saw
her go; but there were two of us who did. Burden was one of the two. I
don't need to tell you who the other fool was.
Mrs. Senter and I were partners, as we generally are, if there's any
bridge going in the evening. She's devoted to the game, and it's always
she who proposes it. I would generally prefer to fag up our route for
next day with guide-books and road-maps. But hosts, like beggars, can't
be "choosers."
Well, to-night Emily and Burden had all the cards, and Burden wanted a
second rubber, but his aunt doesn't like losing her money to her nephew,
even though we play for childishly low stakes. She said she "knew that
Mrs. Norton was tired," and Emily didn't deny the soft impeachment, as
she plays bridge in the same way she would do district visiting during
an epidemic of measles--because it is her duty.
Dick had the latest French imitation of Sherlock Holmes to read, and a
box of Egyptian cigarettes to smoke (mine), which he evidently thinks
too young for me. Emily had some embroidery, which I seem to remember
that she began when I was a boy, and kept religiously to do in hotels.
(But what is there that my good sister does, which she does not do
religiously?) Mrs. Senter had nothing to amuse or occupy her--except
your humble servant--consequently she suggested a stroll in the garden
before bedtime.
She was almost beautiful in the moonlight, quite ethereal-looking, and
her hair a nimbus for that small white face of hers; just as small, just
as white, and just as smooth as when those big eyes used to look up into
our eyes under an Indian moon. And she is always agreeable, always
witty, or at least "smart." Still, I must confess that I was ungallantly
absent-minded until something she said waked me up from a brown study.
"He really _is_ a nice boy," she was saying, "and after all, it's a
tribute to your distinguished qualities that he should be afraid to
speak to you."
I guessed at once that she must have been talking of her nephew.
"What is he afraid to say to me?" I enquired.
"Afraid to ask you for Miss Lethbridge," she explained.
I think just about that time an ugly black eyelid shut down over the
moon. Anyhow, the world darkened for me.
"Isn't it rather old-fashioned, in these rapid days, for a young man to
ask a guardian's permission to make love to his ward?" said I, savage as
a chained dog.
She laughed. "Oh, he hasn't waited for that to make love, I'm afraid,"
she returned. "But he's afraid she won't accept him without your
consent."
"He seems to be afraid of several things," I growled. "Afraid to speak
to me--afraid to speak to her."
"He is young, and love has made him modest," Mrs. Senter excused her
favourite. "He knows he isn't a _grand parti_. But if they care for each
other?"
"I have seen no reason to believe that she cares for him," said I,
thinking myself (more or less) safe in the recollection of Ellaline's
words at Winchester. I told you about them, I think.
"Ah, well," said Mrs. Senter, "she cares enough, anyhow, to have entered
into a pact of some sort with the poor boy--a kind of understanding
that, if _you_ approve, she may at least _think_ of being engaged to him
in the future."