From sketch-book and diary
- -
- 100%
- +
“There is a funicular railway up this mountain, but it does not work at night, and we thus have a taste of the vanishing Past. Far more effective, this railway, for it climbs the hill boldly and with uncovered sides, whilst our old road is hemmed in by high vineyard walls, and the straining of the little goaded oxen is amongst those belongings of the Past which I will gladly see vanish with it.
“On our way up the incline, which would be impossible to horses and to wheels, our kind cicerone invited us to see his garden and the view of the bay and the great ocean which was swelling away in the light towards Morocco. It was a lovely garden, and we crept about it round the little cosy house, and looked up at the closed shutters, within which la famille Payne lay slumbering. We even went on tip-toe through the sitting-rooms, which the owner, looking as though he was burgling his own house, lit with a little lantern. In one there was a parrot asleep, in another an engraving of the ‘Roll Call,’ and again I began to think I might be dreaming and would wake, with tears, in Sloane Street. But the ‘dream’ was solid and we continued our upward progress with four additional oxen to each sledge and double whooping, and swearing, and prodding, for the gradient now was terrific. At the end of the sledge track we halted, and, getting out, we climbed to the hill top on foot and from there beheld a lovely sight – deep valleys and vine-clad hills and the great ocean beyond, and our Castle Liner blazing with electric light more than 2000 feet below in the profound calm of Funchal Bay. The stars were very lustrous and the ‘Scorpion’s Heart’ aflame with red and green. We then took a mysterious walk in brilliant moonlight and intense black shadow to the edge of a great ravine or coral, from the bottom of which rose the harsh sound of a torrent, invisible in the shadow. Sugarcanes waved in the night breeze and banana plants rustled and whispered, but no one was awake in all the land but our little party.
“Dreamlike again, on our way back to where we had got out of the sledges, we had tea in another enchanted garden at 2 A.M. Our cabmen had hammered at that garden gate a long time, looking like stage peasants knocking at an operatic moonlit portal, before the waiter could be awakened, and by the time we returned from our walk the sleepy creature in tail coat, but minus his tie, was ready for us. When we passed that mysterious threshold we found ourselves in a garden full of the scent of box hedges and tinkling with fountains. We walked in the chequered shadow cast by palms and cypresses, and, soothed by the sound of running water, we felt we would like to stay there till the dawn. What a night to impress the children’s minds with! Our tea was hilarious, in an arbour facing the ocean, but our hilarity was to reach its climax when we got into two toboggans, three people in each, and slithered down the 2000 foot declivity which our oxen had so painfully and slowly drawn us up. The oxen had vanished with the sledges and the drivers, and a new set of men piloted us down the tremendous incline.
“Nothing makes me laugh more than a toboggan in full flight with its helpless load. I had the pace moderated, in spite of protests, for I really did not care to have a variation of the too recent Bay of Biscay; but the toboggans got out of hand sometimes or had to be given their heads round the corners. It was vertigo then.
“Ah, good night, or rather good morning, peerless Madeira!”
Then followed days of blue weather and ever-increasing heat. A lonely voyage – not a sail to be seen. In that long-drawn-out monotony we made the most of trivialities.
I read in my diary one night in the Tropics: —
“There is to be a fancy-dress ball to-night, in connection with crossing the Line the other day, I suppose; the second class passengers are to come over and dance with the first class on the gaily decorated promenade deck. I am pleased at the appearance of the three children. C. has made up from some Eastern muslins a very coquettish Turkish costume with a little cap, which becomes her to my entire satisfaction. E. looks the typical ‘duck’ in a poke bonnet all over little pink roses, and I have buckled up little M. in a colonial cavalry ‘rig,’ slouched hat and all, Captain S. lending his sabre, which is somewhat longer than the temporary owner.”
Here I must interpolate the statement of certain facts which will enable you more fully to sympathise with me in the catastrophe that closes this mid-ocean episode.
You must know that white servants are impossible to find at the Cape, and one must bring all one’s staff out with one, “for better, for worse,” it may be for three, four, five years. If any turn out badly, it is true you may send them home, but – who is to replace them? I could not persuade my cook at Dover Castle to undertake this expatriation, her courage failing her at the last moment, and I had to find an untried substitute. She was a Dane with the blood of generations of bellicose Vikings coursing through her veins, and I had watched her daily on the other deck from afar with apprehensions.
“The ball is over and I feel decidedly limp. I thought I was going to have a pleasant evening. I was sitting with Lady – and all the others who were not masquerading, enjoying the sight of the figures in all kinds of extempore costumes appearing on the deck from below and mustering prior to setting to, the band playing a spirited waltz, when there slowly emerged from the saloon stairway, as though rising from the waves she rules – Britannia! First a high brass helmet with scarlet crest, then a trident held in one hand, a shield in the other, and the folds of the Union Jack draping her commanding form. She stepped on deck. ‘I say,’ said a voice, ‘this is the success of the evening; who is it?’ ‘Who is it?’ you heard on every side. ‘Who is it?’ asked Lady – turning to me. ‘My cook,’ I faintly answered. The last speaker knew her South Africa, and all the possibilities of the future might have spoken in my face to judge by the choking laughter that caused her precipitate withdrawal. Each time she ventured back within sight of my smileless face the fit seized her again. Later on I saw Britannia dancing in a small set of Lancers hand in hand with the Marchioness. Shall I ever get her harnessed now?”
I went back to hang over the bulwarks and lose myself among the stars.
And so we made our way athwart the world. Each evening every one went to scan the chart where the little “atom’s” progress was marked with, to us, an all too short pen-stroke, showing the distance covered in the last twenty-four hours. And in time the sad South Atlantic broke up the exquisite blue weather of the Tropics.
The diary goes on: “To-night we saw the Pole Star set for the last time. A profound melancholy – a sense of losing a life-companion – falls on the mind. The child who has just seen its old nurse turn a bend in the road and disappear looks with rueful eyes on the bright newcomer. The Southern Cross and all the new stars will never fill the void left by the constellations which I have watched above the beloved scenes of the Northern World. My thoughts follow the Pole Star beyond the dark rim of the horizon. Dear old friend! I shall not feel content, no matter how beautiful I shall find the Southern heavens, till the joyful night when the captain of the Homeward Bound tells us we shall see thee rise. When will that be – in two – in three – years?”
I spoke just now of the “sad” South Atlantic. To me it will always be the saddest part of the world. The sky above it loses the transparent and radiant quality of blue (“less blue than radiant,” Mrs. Browning happily says of the Florentine sky) and takes more of a cobalt quality, and the tone of the sea follows suit. The effect of the diminishing warmth also chills one morally and physically, and one knows that the best is passed. The phrase, “a waste of waters,” comes constantly to the mind.
The following extract from the diary will show how this mournful sentiment of the South Atlantic was one day accentuated – stamped, as it were, with the seal of sorrow, on our return voyage, four days from Cape Town. “We had a burial at sea, the forlornest thing I have ever witnessed. A poor consumptive governess, travelling alone, died last night, who must have been far too ill to be put on board ship. She was buried at eleven this morning.
“We were kneeling near the body, which lay on a bier shaped like a tray, covered with the Union Jack, at the open gangway overhanging the dreary tossing waters. Not a glimpse of blue sky above, the dense clouds shut it out. As she belonged to our Church, W., in uniform, read the prayers and Captain C. the responses. When the prayers were ended the bier was tilted by the six sailors who had been grasping it all through the service. The poor little body, sewn up in sacking, darted out, with a rattle of the leaden weights, from under the covering flag and fell with a loud splash into the black ocean; the flowers that had been placed on it scattered on the foam, and, as the ship scarcely stopped, these were soon left behind to sink and disappear. He who read the prayers said to me when all was over, ‘Christ walks the waters as well as the land.’”
Two days after I read: “A concert this evening, with some comic songs. I noticed the piano was draped with the same Union Jack that covered the poor girl two days ago.”
One can hardly realize what a sailing voyage of this magnitude must have been in the old days. Our modern impatience can hardly endure the thought. The announcement one evening that at dawn we should sight Table Mountain was extremely pleasant. The arrival had the never-fading charm. “I see papa!” sang out little M. “How are the children?” hailed papa from the quay. “All well!” And we land on utterly new ground to begin a new experience. A short train journey, turning the flank of Table Mountain, brings us to our new home at Rosebank, where I find a pair of shapely Cape ponies harnessed to the Victoria awaiting us at the station.
CHAPTER II
AT ROSEBANK, CAPE COLONY
“STRANGE land; strange birds with startling cries; strange flowers; strange scents! I received a bouquet of welcome on my arrival composed of grass-green flowers with brilliant rose-coloured leaves. Where am I? Where are the points of the compass?
“I was watching the sun travelling to his setting this evening, and, forgetting I was perforce facing North to watch him, he seemed to be sloping down towards the East! And lo! when he was gone, the crescent moon on the wrong side of the sunset and turned the wrong way. And a cold south wind bringing melancholy messages from the Antarctic. ‘There has been a storm in the south,’ some one said, and the words struck drearily on my mind’s ear.
“My Bible, so full of imagery taken from the aspects of Nature, is turned inside out.
Arise (depart), north wind; and come, O south wind; blow through my garden, and let the aromatical spices thereof flow (Canticles iv. 16).
“My Shakespeare is upside down.
At Christmas I no more desire a roseThan wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth. —Love’s Labour’s Lost.“Here roses load the Christmas air with sweetness, and May ushers in the snow upon the mountains.
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,Hath put a spirit of youth in everything. —Sonnet.“Here April is in the ‘sear and yellow.’
“Yesterday a furnace-blast swooped down upon us from the great deserts to the north, and I feel I shall never be myself while I continue to see my shadow at noonday projected southward. But enough of grumbling for the present.
“Nowhere have I seen such starlight as streams upon the earth from the Milky Way, which belts the whole heavens here with silver. I don’t know why I have never seen the Milky Way so distinct and splendid in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the glory of the South African nights, and I have the pleasure, too, of seeing the entire sweep of the ‘Scorpion’s’ tail, superb scroll of blazing stars. I knew the Southern Cross would be disappointing, and so was not disappointed.
“It gyrates over the Pole in a way to greatly astonish the uninitiated. The other evening, dressing for an evening function, I saw it before my window upright, and on coming home in the small hours, behold it on its head!
“I cannot hope ever to convey to the mind of those who have not experienced Cape Colony the extraordinarily powerful local feeling of these days and nights. Melancholy they are – at least to me – but most, most beautiful and pungently poetical. The aromatic quality of the odours that permeate the air suggests that word. Yet all is too strange to win the heart of a newcomer, however much his eyes and mind may be captivated.
“If an artist wanted to accomplish that apparently impossible feat of painting Fairyland direct from Nature, without one touch supplied out of his own fancy, he would only have to come here. There are effects of light and colour on these landscapes that I never saw elsewhere. The ordinary laws seem set aside. For instance, you expect a palm-tree to tell dark against the sunset. Oh, dear me no, not necessarily here. I saw one a tender green, and the sand about it was in a haze of softest rose-colour, through which shone the vivid orange light of the sunset behind it. Incredible altogether are the colours at sunset, but all so fleeting. And there is no after-glow here as in Egypt and Italy; the instant the glory of the setting sun is gone all is over and all is grey.
“Even the melancholy-quaint sound of the frogs through the night suggests fairy tales. It is appealing in its own way. I thought the Italian maremma frog noisy, but no one can imagine what an orgy of shrill croaking fills the nights here. They are everywhere, these irrepressibles, though invisible; near your head, far away, under your feet, at your side, in the tree-tops, in the streams, for ever springing their rattles with renewed zest. I shall never hear nocturnal frogs again without being transported to these regions of strange and melancholy nights.
“Table Mountain rises square and precipitous above our garden, far above the simmer of the frogs, and looks like an altar in the pure white light that falls upon it from the Milky Way. How still, how holy in its repose of the long ages it looks, and the thought comes to one’s mind, ‘Would that all the evil brought to South Africa by the finding of the gold could be gathered together and burnt on that altar as a peace offering!’
“On this Rosebank side there is nothing that jars with the majestic feeling of Table Mountain, but to see what we English have done at its base on the other side, at Cape Town, is to see what man can do in his little way to outrage Nature’s dignity. The Dutch never jarred; their old farm-houses with white walls, thatched roofs, green shutters, and rounded Flemish gables look most harmonious in this landscape. Wherever we have colonized there you will see the corrugated iron dwelling, the barbed-wire fence, the loathsome advertisement. We talk so much of the love of the beautiful, and yet no people do so much to spoil beauty as we do wherever we settle down, all the world over. I respect the Dutch saying; ‘The eye must have something’ – beauty is a necessity to moral health. A clear sky and a far horizon have more value to the national mind than we care to recognize, and though the smoking factory that falsifies England’s skies and blurs her horizons may fill our pockets with gold, it makes us poorer by dulling our natures. I am sure that a clear physical horizon induces a clear mental one.
“As you gaze, enraptured, at the rosy flush of evening on the mountains across “False Bay” from some vantage point on the road to Simon’s Town, your eye is caught by staring letters in blatant colours in the foreground. “Keller’s boots are the best”; “Guinea Gold Cigarettes”; “Go to the Little Dust Pan, Cape Town, for your Kitchen things.” I won’t go to the Little Dust Pan. Of all the horrors, a dust pan at Cape Town, where your eyes are probably full enough of dust already from the arid streets, and your face stinging with the pebbles blown into it by a bitter “sou’easter”? I once said in Egypt I knew nothing more trying than paying calls in a “hamseem,” but a Cape Town “sou’easter” disarraying you, under similar circumstances, is a great deal more exasperating.
“I am told the Old Cape Town, when Johannesburg was as yet dormant, was a simple and comely place – its white houses, so well adapted to this intensely sunny climate, were deep set in wooded gardens, a few of which have so far escaped the claws of the jerry builder. (O United States, what things you send us – “jerry,” “shoddy” – !) But now the glaring streets, much too wide, and left unfinished, are lined with American “Stores” with cast-iron porticoes, above which rise buildings of most pretentious yet nondescript architecture, and the ragged outskirts present stretches of corrugated iron shanties which positively rattle back the clatter of a passing train or tram-car. And all around lie the dust bins of the population, the battered tin can, the derelict boot. No authorities seem yet to have been established to prevent the populace, white, brown, and black, from throwing out all their old refuse where they like. Some day things may be taken in hand, but at present this half-baked civilization produces very dreadful results. There is promise of what, some day, may be done in the pleasing red Parliament House and the beautiful public gardens of the upper town. There is such a rush for gold, you see! No one cares for poor Cape Town as a town. The adventurer is essentially a bird of passage. Man and Nature contrast more unfavourably to the former here than elsewhere, and the lines, ring in my ears all day.
Where every prospect pleasesAnd only man is vile,“Altogether our Eden here is sadly damaged, and I am sorry it should be my compatriots who are chiefly answerable for the ugly patches on so surpassingly beautiful a scene. Our sophisticated life, too, is out of place in this unfinished country, and we ought to live more simply, as the Dutch do, and not feel it necessary to carry on the same ménage as in London. Liveried servants in tall hats and cockades irritate me under such a sun, and the butler in his white choker makes me gasp. An extravagant London-trained cook is more than ever trying where all provisions are so absurdly dear. The native servant in his own suitable dress, as in India and Egypt, does not exist down here.
“One of the chief reasons, I find, as I settle down in my new surroundings, for the feeling of incompleteness which I experience, is the fact of this country’s having no history. We get forlorn glimpses of the Past, when the old Dutch settlers used to hear the roar of the lions outside Cape Town Fort of nights; and, further back, we get such peeps as the quaint narratives of the early explorers allow us, but beyond those there is the great dark void.
“This is all from my own point of view, and I know there is one, an Africander born,1 who, with strong and vivid pen, writes with sympathy of the charms of Italy, but only expands into heartfelt home-fervour when returning to the red soil and atmospheric glamour of her native veldt. This personal way of looking at things makes the value of all art, literary and pictorial, to my mind. Set two artists of equal merit to paint the same scene together; the two pictures will be quite unlike each other. I am of those who believe that picture will live longest which contains the most of the author’s own thought, provided the author’s thought is worthy, and the technical qualities are good, well understood.”
I will end my South African sketch by one more page of diary, which, in recording a day’s expedition to the Paarl, gives an impression of the Cape landscape which may stand as typical of all its inland scenery.
“On Whitsun-eve we had a most enchanting expedition to Stellenbosch and the Paarl, which I will describe here. W., I, the children, and the B.’s, formed the party. We left home just at sunrise, the heavy dew warning us of a very hot winter’s day, though it was then cold enough. We took the train to Stellenbosch, and I was in ecstasies over the perfect loveliness of the scenes we passed through as the train climbed the incline towards those deeply serrated mountains which we were to pierce by and by. Looking back as we rose I could more fully appreciate the majestic proportions of Table Mountain, at whose base we live, and, when a long way off it stood above the plain in solitude, disclosed in its entirety, pale amethyst in the white morning light, I was more than ever filled with a sense of the majesty of this land which this dominating mountain seemed to gather up into itself and typify.
“Quite different in outline are the fantastic mountains we passed athwart to-day, and nowhere have I seen such intense unmixed ultramarine shadows as those that palpitate in their deep kloofs in contrast with the rosy warmth of their sunlit buttresses and jagged peaks. And as to the foregrounds here, when you get into the primeval wilderness, what words can I find to give an idea of their colouring, and of the profusion of the wild shrubs, all so spiky and aromatic, and some so weird, so strange, that cover the sandy plains? Here are some notes. In distance, blue mountains; middle distance, pine woods, dark; in foreground, gold-coloured shrubs, islanded in masses of bronze foliage full of immense thistle-shaped pink and white flowers; bright green rushes standing eight feet high, with brown heads waving; black cattle knee-deep in the rich herbage and a silver-grey stork slowly floating across the blue of the still sky.
“But this most paintable and decorative vegetation is not friendly to the intruder. These exquisitely toned shrubs with wild strong forms are full of repellent spikes which, like bayonets, they seem to level at you if, lured by the gentle perfume of their blossoms, you approach eye and nose too near. Depend upon it, this country was intended for thick-skinned blacks.
“As you get farther from town influences there appear much better human forms in the landscape, and to-day I was greatly struck with the appearance of an ox-waggon drawn by twelve big-horned beasts, and upon its piled-up load stood picturesque male and female Malays in white and gay colours – quite a triumphal car. A negro with immense whip walked by the side, and behind rose a long avenue of old stone-pines, and at the end of the vista the blue sky. These stone-pine avenues that border the red-earthed highways are among the most delightful of the many local beauties of the Cape, and such stone-pines! Old giants bigger than any I have seen on the Riviera. There are dense forests of them here, lovely things to look down on, with their soft, velvety masses of round tops of a rich dark green, looking like one solid mass. The wise Dutch who planted them had a law whereby any one felling one of these pines was bound to plant two saplings in its stead. We are doing a great deal of the felling without the planting.
“At Stellenbosch we got out, and, to my pleasure, I saw a long sort of char-à-banc driven at a hand gallop into the station yard, drawn by three mules and three horses – the vehicle ordered by W. to convey us to the ‘Paarl.’ And why ‘Paarl’? Deep among the mountains rises a double peak, bearing imbedded in each summit an immense smooth rock rounded like a black titanic ‘Pearl’ that glistens in the sun as it beats on its polished surface. Thither we blithely sped, one driver holding the multitudinous reins of our mixed team, the other manœuvering with both hands his immensely long whip, the gyrations of the thong being an interesting thing to watch as he touched up now this beast and now that. They have a way in this country of keeping up a uniform trot uphill, downhill, and on the level, but stopping frequently to breathe the team.” (Ah! give me road travel with horses – it is more human than the motor!) “After an enchanting stage through wild mountain gorges we came to an oak fixed upon by W. beforehand as marking our halting place, and there the six beasts were ‘out-spanned.’ The simple harness was just slipped off and laid along on the road where the animals stood, and then they were allowed to stray into the wild, tumbling bush as they liked and have a roll, if so minded. Then we lit a fire and spread our repast under the shade of the oak at the edge of a wood that sloped down to a mountain stream. All round the solemn mountains, all about us fragrant aromatic flowers and the call of wild African birds! I can well understand the passionate love an Africander-born must feel for his country. I know none that has such strong, saturating local sentiment. The horses and mules, whose feet I had espied several times waving in spurts of rolling above the undergrowth, being collected and ‘in-spanned,’ we set off for the Paarl Station and descended back into the Plain by rail at sunset; and as we left the mountains behind us they were flushing in the glory from the West, their shadows remaining of the same astonishing ultramarine they had kept all day. In any other country the blue would have changed somewhat, but here I don’t expect anything to follow any known rules – I accept the phenomena of things around me as time goes on, and have ceased to wonder. Oh! vision of loveliness, strange and unique, which this day has given me, never to be forgotten.”