The Retrospect

CHAPTER XI

AT THE SEASIDE

I have been looking over a batch of new magazines, and the heading of a paper in one of them gives a sentence borrowed from a letter of Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Dean Howells, which I will borrow again for an opening to this chapter: "I've a theory that every author while living has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant places and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never knew him in the flesh. When the author dies this phantom fades away … then the dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature." Having written this down and looked at it, I feel that it is not so profound a saying as I thought. The first proposition is as obvious as can be; your eidolon is in the pages of your book, and the more directly you speak to your affinity the more quickly he responds (and he cannot respond effectively unless you are there to know it); the second seems to pass over the fact that when these spirit friendships materialise they become as other friendships, independent of literature or any outside thing. What I set out to show, by my quotation, was that the friends my eidolon had made for me in England outnumbered the friends of corporeal origin, and that some of them gave me my happiest English days. I flew to their arms as naturally and fearlessly as if I had lived with them in the flesh for as many years as we had otherwise known each other, and when I am dead I shall not be a dead author to them, but a dead woman. Alas! the phantom fades away in any event.

This I have found to be the prime joy of authorship – the knowledge that, when you are projecting yourself into your book, although nobody around you may know or care what you are talking about, you are still bound to reach some who will perfectly understand. You are speaking to your unknown kindred in the near and distant places; if you do not know it at the time – but you do know it – the proof comes later in the letters of some of them, who tell you they have been impelled to write. Precious recognition! And letters are so eloquent between the lines that you rarely make mistakes about them. They tell you that the wireless message has got "home" to where it belongs – or otherwise.

At the beginning of this century I published a volume of personal reminiscences, entitled "Thirty Years in Australia." Coincident with the conversion of the colony of Victoria into a state of the new Commonwealth, the thirtieth year of my sojourn within her borders was completed in 1900, and it seemed a good time to say something of what in our young country we call the "old days," the "good old times," the old pioneer colonial life of which the records are so few at home and the ignorance abroad so vast. Although, when I come to think of it, I believe it was merely as a rest from novel-writing that I started upon the work. I gossiped through the casual chapters – drivelled, some may say, much as I am doing now – with no idea that the completed book would be other than a trifling by-product (my London agent agreeing with this view), of little interest to readers outside Australia. But behold! Of the score or more of "works" to which I must plead guilty, this one has brought me more happiness than all the others put together, on each of which the profit in love has been more considerable than the profit in money. Old friends of the seventies, long passed from sight and knowledge although not from mind, recognised themselves in the guarded initials of their names, and they or their widowed partners or their children wrote to tell me where they were, to recall past companionships, to urgently beg and hospitably plan for a renewal of them. And thus came delightful reunions, mendings of gaps, comparing of experiences, comradeships for old age such as can never be for those who have not spent some of their youth together.

But far beyond the number of these were the friends not made by accident but by the design of Nature, although the accident of the book discovered them – friends altogether unknown until it found them for me in the near and distant places – also to be lost no more.

Away in Ireland lived a retired colonel of Hussars, who one day took it from the shelves of his local library. He did not fancy the title – Australia was not a name to conjure with in the British Isles, British though she was – but, after turning a few leaves, he thought it might serve for an idle hour. He read it aloud to his wife after dinner, and when he had finished it he wrote to me. It was the beginning of a correspondence which, by the time I started for England, gave me the hope of seeing them as one of the joys before me. And when I arrived their welcoming letter was amongst the first batch to come on board, and notified that he was himself in London, "at my service." As was the case in every situation of this kind, sanguine anticipations were fulfilled, and something left over. Never once was I disappointed in a spirit friend made flesh. I met him first at luncheon in the house of the beloved friend who had set herself to give me the time of my life, and he helped her to do it. I shall not forget the Ascot week of 1908. Certainly I have not much time to remember it in, but if I had a hundred years it would be the same. After we had "done" London – the restaurant dinners and the plays, the pictures, the flip-flap and the Sports' Club at the Franco-British Exhibition, little gaieties of a world I had not known but took to like a duck to water – he planned out my route to Ireland. That would have been the crown of all, but time and money would not stretch to it. Never mind. I still expect to go there some day.

Then away in Boston – Boston in Massachusetts – there lives another dear friend, discovered just as he was. For years we have corresponded intimately, and every line that I write for the press I can regard as a letter to her. She would come to Australia to see me, if she could; the possibility of such an enterprise on the part of a much-engaged wife and mother has been considered; but her promise to meet me in England, should I ever be there, was absolute. One does not allow for the "visitation of God" in making one's engagements, and it was only that which abrogated this one. I heard from her that she had been ready to start, not for London but for my ship at the docks, to be the first to receive me, bringing over a motor for my English use; and illness in her family had stopped her. She begged me to wait for the following spring, but I could not; and so we have not materialised each other yet. If we never do so, we shall love each other to the end. But we are hoping still.

And there were other friends of the eidolon in England and inaccessible, whose letters of welcome awaited me at Gravesend. One of them lived, as she still lives, at that watering-place on the Norfolk coast where I spent happy summers with my family when a child. That is to say, she lives in the new watering-place (not in existence then) which is an offshoot of the one I knew, still an old village, which its modern neighbour was from the first forbidden to touch. The lord of the manor comprising both – he who kept drinking houses and dissenting chapels off his land for so long – had a sense of the fitness of things so fine that it was almost a fad. When he allowed the new watering-place on the cliff where but one solitary house – an inn – had stood in my time, he laid the plan of the town himself and permitted only a beautiful brown stone of the locality to be used for the houses. Now vulgar bricks and jerry-building are creeping in, because his son, the present squire, cannot help it; but the good taste of the founder can stand up against them for a long time to come. It was never the typical fashionable watering-place, and, thanks to him, never can be until his work is swept away.

It is a great place, however, to have grown up in the interval since I walked to it from old H – , with my governess, to inquire at the "New Inn" (old then, and a beautiful house now) whether by chance they had such a things as "Revalenta Arabica," which a doctor or somebody had recommended for our dying baby, and for which we had ransacked the village in vain. I think that was my last sight of "The Green" that now is, which the local guide-book describes as "a standing reminder of the artistic mind that conceived and executed the formation of H – ." To the people of this part, they are H – now, and the ancient village a mile away is Old H – ; more often it is insultingly referred to as the Old End; to me the village is H – , and this New H – . Of course this H – monopolises all the luxuries of civilisation; not only the old "New Inn" (with a new name and enlarged and important), on one side of the Green, but a huge G.E.R. Hotel, with the railway station under it, on the other; a great Town Hall, a grand pier with pavilion at the end of it, a fine stone-balustraded "Sea Walk" above the beach, public gardens, public tennis-courts; a splendid church, with its independent vicar and curate, and (which should surely make the late squire turn in his grave) a Wesleyan Chapel and a "Union" Chapel, the latter evidently some other irregular denomination, since I do not think New H – has a workhouse yet; besides gas and telephones and all such things.

And so here lived my friend, where she could be quite comfortable. But in the days when she was not a widow, but wife of a rector of the neighbourhood – and before that, as a member of an old Norfolk family (she married into another) – she knew all about the H – of my day; and when she chanced to read "Thirty Years in Australia," and penetrated my dark allusions to the locality and my unprinted thoughts about it, the kindly notion came into her head to tell me that my old H – of cherished memory was still there, unchanged. With the divination of a spirit friend she knew just what it would mean to me to know that. Not only did she write to tell me, she sent me a bundle of photographs to prove her words. When I received them, I had no ghost of an idea that I should ever see H – again with my bodily eyes, and they gushed tears over the little postcard scenes, so full of sad and sweet reminders of vanished hands and days that were no more. I kept them on a table by my Australian bedside, and used to strike matches in the middle of the night and light a candle to look at them once more, and again once more. Little did I foresee the day when I should buy them at their place of origin (fourpence a dozen) for myself!

Of course I wrote to thank her, although I could not find words to thank her adequately; it was the beginning of a correspondence signifying a lasting friendship.

And, amongst the many unexpected things that have happened to me of late was my visit to H – and to her, just a year ago from this date of writing about it.

For once letters had not revealed the writer; she was not at all the type of woman they had suggested to my mind; nevertheless we suited each other, to use an expressive vulgarism, "down to the ground." In spite of a constitutional objection to strangers and dislike of "company" as such, common to us both, and in spite of marked differences of view upon important points between us, a very short time sufficed to bring us to that state of mutual trust and understanding in which we could say anything we liked to one another. And that is a state that many lifelong friends, the vast majority of them indeed, not to speak of near and dear relations, do not attain to.

But I must not talk here of our private affairs. Nor can I dwell as I would like to dwell upon the domestic aspect of the fortnight we spent together. I can say this much, however, she has the instinct for home-making that is so surprisingly lacking (according to my experience) in nine housewives out of ten. The stupidity of my sex in this important business is one of the perennial annoyances of my life. It is not a question – or in but a very small degree a question – of money. Mrs B. would know how to make a bark hut comfortable, or a fork of the ancestral tree. So would I. I could not have loved her as I do if her house had been disordered and her habits out of drawing; I am sure she must have cared less for me if I had not appreciated the refined simplicity combined with luxurious comfort of her ménage. I do like comfort, and see no reason to apologise for it as for a gross taste and a low. When I go into splendid rooms that are not used, or that have no fire in them on a chilly day, I feel as cross as when I see someone sitting by the open door of a railway carriage when the train moves, without putting out a hand to shut it. When I passed through Mrs B.'s kitchen (at such times as it was convenient to us to return home by way of the back gate), and looked upon M.'s shining range and twinkling dish-covers, the clear, dustless fire, the bright rug on the spotless floor, the cheerful red tablecloth, and her little tea, as dainty as ours, set out – that to me was a beautiful room, surpassing the saloons of palaces.

Our days were ordered perfectly, for real, downright comfort, when that was all that needed to be considered, as was then the case with Mrs B. and me. She knew intuitively that I would like my tea at half-past six better than at seven or later – as she did herself – and brought it to me then in her own hands, which had prepared the delicious tray. This was to strike the keynote of the harmonious hours. Having refreshed myself I had an hour or two of reverie in my soft bed, my brain cleared to brightness by the tea, the freshness of the summer morning about me. It was the only house except my own in which I had ever found it possible to do a bit of professional work, and it was in that peaceful interval between tea and bath that ideas for it were born and shaped themselves. At eleven the pony-carriage came round. She is a fine whip, but never used the implement on her own pony, a half Arab, wholly aristocratic animal, not quite in his first youth; he and she were on the footing of mother and son, with a complete understanding between them. Just to keep him in his place she would pretend to draw the whip from its socket occasionally, and although he had no eyes in the back of his head it was enough to recall him to zealous duty. He nuzzled in her coat pockets for sugar, and he knew her voice when he could not see her, whinnying wildly from his stall at the livery stables, where she sometimes visited him. Almost daily he arrived to take us out, always in a fresh direction, always over country that I had known and loved and never hoped to see again, until I began to forget I had ever left it.

At one o'clock we returned – I ravenously hungry – to the ever-perfect meal. Thereafter more or less subdued and somnolent we repaired to the drawing-room and two seductive resting-places therein; one was a remarkably comfortable long sofa, the other a remarkably comfortable deep easy-chair, and each of us took one, and it did not matter which. The day's newspapers lay at hand, and our respective work-bags, but we frankly allowed ourselves to drop asleep, which was perhaps the most profitable occupation for a pair of grandmothers at that period of the day, although one I was not accustomed to indulge in. At half-past four came M., with the tea-table, her transparent bread-and-butter, her memorable cakes and hot cakes, her jug of freshest cream, the boiling kettle and the caddy. And after such a tea as that, it was well that the next item of the programme was a walk, to prepare us for the equally appealing little dinner to be engaged in at eight.

It was in these walks that I drew nearest to the ghosts of the old days that thronged the place. Some obscure spinal delicacy prevented my hostess from going far on her own feet, although she was so majestically erect and so strong and young to look at; so she would carry book or knitting to a seat upon the Green (a grassy plateau at the top of the cliff, sloping seaward), or to one of the glass-walled shelters, useful Queen's Jubilee Memorials, planted at intervals alongside the cliff path, between the Green and the Lighthouse, and there rest and amuse herself while I wandered as I liked. We were so entirely at ease with each other that no apologies for such casual separations were required.

Naturally I walked away towards the Old End every time. And as soon as the last Jubilee Shelter was behind me I was in the world of my youth, where almost nothing was changed. How many hundreds of times had my feet scampered along that dear cliff path – to come back, after such far wanderings, to find it just the same! Only a track in the sea grass, a little more hollowed out perhaps, a little nearer to the cliff face, which the waves below had nibbled away until there was barely room to get past the lighthouse wall. The same wild scabiouses that we found there in bygone Augusts were blooming, richly purple as the clematis on Mrs B.'s house front, along the cliff edge. Half-a-century was gone like a passing puff of wind as I stooped to gather them. A dozen times I had to stop and wheel to look across the sea so different from every other sea; and in the evening fight, especially in clear shining after rain, the old "Stump" stood up like a pencil-mark on the far-distant horizon, and I saw again the ravelled threads that meant Skegness on the one hand and "The Deeps" on the other, familiar as the nose on my own face. This cliff path used to be the beat of our old friends, the coastguardsmen, who paced it solemnly day and night, with their telescopes under their arms. I saw no coastguard now, or I must have accosted him, and asked him to let me peep through his glass, for old sake's sake. He used to go on one knee and steady the instrument on his shoulder, and we used to stand behind him to gaze and exclaim.

Down below lay the great green-haired boulders, the tumbled rocks of the hard conglomerate that outlasted the superimposed strata of the rainbow-cake-like cliff, where doubtless the contraband cask or case found – or but for him would have found – temporary storage in the good old times; but I did not go down, because now the trippers pervaded the beach (leaving to the residents their more aristocratic terraces and Green), and the squalid litter of their picnics defiled the place. Half-a-century ago it was our happy hunting ground, and almost all our own. Here we plied bucket and spade from morn to eve; gathered marvellous treasures from the clear wells and pools between the rocks, ammonites out of the grey marl, "thunderbolts" out of the red chalk; chased crabs and shrimps and little fishes, built forts and castles, sailed boats and nursed dolls, and so on and so on; busy and happy the livelong day. At this point we were caught by the tide one day, and had to sit on a rock ledge till it uncovered the way home. In that archipelago of boulder-islands my foot once slipped into a crevice and was crushed, and the landlady of our lodgings rubbed salt into the bleeding wounds because, she said, that was the way to prevent mortification. Every flat stone, all up and down the beach, was eloquent of mid-morning and mid-afternoon meals, when mother or nurse came down to us with loaded basket to stay our little stomachs between breakfast and dinner and dinner and high tea. Oh, how magnificently hungry we were in those days! And what digestions we had!

The first old landmark that I came to after leaving New H – behind me was the ruin of St Edmund's Chapel. A little fragment of a building that looks, almost as primitive as the cliff supporting it, I should think it could be carted away in a day by a couple of labourers who set their minds to the job; yet there it stood, not a stone displaced, that I could see, since I had played about it as a child. King Edmund the Martyr, say the old chroniclers, built the hermitage of which this is all remaining to commemorate the spot where he landed and to make himself a private study in which to learn the whole Book of Psalms by heart. Think of the hundreds of years of its history, back of the fifty of mine! I used not to think of it, but I thought of it a great deal when I stood on the hallowed ground again.

Then came the lighthouse – still the old lighthouse to the best of my recollection, but with a Marconi installation and a few cottages and their families added to it. And once it seemed to stand away in a field, and now it is so near to the cliff edge that there is scarcely room to get past the wall. The wall may be breached at any moment, and it will not be long after that before they will have to rebuild the tower.

I leaned over that low wall and looked into the enclosure. The men were having a game of cricket – such a natural thing to see where one sees a group of official Englishmen doing as they like in their off time (they were playing cricket at Aden and at Suez, regardless of the sweltering heat). When these lighthouse men, coming and going in their game, glanced towards me, watching them, it struck me as such a strange thing that they did not know who I was. I felt almost as if I had more right to be there than they. But when I totted up the years of my absence and the years of the oldest man amongst them, I knew I could be nothing to him but a stranger and an outsider, even as any other summer visitor out for a walk along the cliff. Yet how I longed to beckon him to the wall and ask him if he remembered the old times!

Beyond the lighthouse the cliff fell away gradually to a gradually diminishing sand-bank – as, of course, it had always done; and, descending the sloping path, I saw below me my old village, my own old beach, untouched by the hand of "improvement" which had been so busy near by. No, not quite untouched; the old village inn and coaching-house (when we first frequented the place there was no railway, and we coached the fifteen miles from L – ) was now "The Golf Links Hotel," enlarged and modernised, and it had absorbed into its new grounds an old lane between hedges, along which we used to go and come, and which I had desired to perambulate again; but neither the hotel nor the links obtruded into the picture, which was substantially the same as I had known and remembered it. The bathing-machines had been moved from their former prominent position, and they had been a great feature. Every morning a couple of them rolled us into the water, where the bathing-woman was sometimes cruelly employed to dip us under, and haul us out again; and a picture of a little brother squatted naked on the roof of one of them, whither he had leaped from the wheel to evade her, and whence he refused to budge for any threats or blandishments, was plain before me when I looked for the machines where they used to be.