We locked the door of the little haunted place, and walked back over the now dewy grass to the house, to deliver the key and say good-bye to our entertainers. Mr B. was ready for us, and drove us home through the lovely woods of W – , which owed some of their loveliness to the old man in his grave behind us, and along new ways that yet were as old and familiar and thick with ghosts as the roads we had come by in the afternoon. The whole dear land was a dream of peace in the long July twilight.
CHAPTER X
OUTDOOR LIFE
It was not a house or church, or wood or field, here or there, that swarmed with reminiscences of my life half-a-century ago; every bit of Norfolk soil that I passed over or looked upon was thick with history of the old times. I had been so sure that the March of Progress, which in the same period had made a highly modern nation out of nothing on the other side of the world, would have swept away the wild-blooming hedgerows, the divisions of the little fields, the rutty, grassy, tree-shaded lanes, the old fashions, generally, of my native county; and I could hardly believe in the luck which had spared so much that the little taken was scarcely missed. Some thirty years ago an Australian friend of mine made a long-desired pilgrimage to the home and graves of the Brontës, and blessed his fate in having chanced upon the last day before the church at Haworth, as Charlotte and Emily had used it, was closed for restoration. I was just too late for Crosby Hall, and the house of the H. family near T – was gone; otherwise I had no disappointments in my search for the ancient landmarks. But that England was so beautifully well kept (and perhaps it was so then, although I did not notice it), it was the same England that I had left, and no part so unchanged as the part of Norfolk I returned to, which I called my own.
Driving about with M., I lived my old outdoor life again, as if there had been no break in it.
That there was any outdoor life at all in those benighted times I have heard questioned and denied in various ways by our athletic offspring. "Oh, what did people do before there were tennis and croquet and golf?" Contemporary writers are fond of drawing comparisons – I have done it myself – between the lady of old, with her prunella shoes and her swoons and her genteel incapability, and the stalwart, active, efficient damsel who now fills her place; wholly, of course, to the advantage of the latter. But, looking back, and trying to be strictly fair all round, I am not sure that the women of the fifties were so much less sensible (according to their lesser lights) than their descendants of to-day. It must be remembered that they could not be more sensible than fashion permitted, and that we are just as craven slaves to that impersonal tyrant as they were. I am sure that if fashion were suddenly to forbid tennis and croquet and golf and the rest, those invigorating pursuits would be abandoned to-morrow. You will say that our enlightened views upon physical culture would remain, to operate in other directions; and one must admit that in the fifties physical culture was unknown. There was no sanitation, no philosophy of food, no anything. Yet folks lived, and to a good old age too. They had one thing that we have not – the tranquil mind – than which there is no better foundation on which to build bodily health. We do not want their tranquil mind – certainly not – but that is beside the question.
In the fifties, although golf and tennis were not games for the multitude, bowls and cricket were as dear to the bewhiskered public as now to the clean-shaven or moustached; and women had their lawn diversions for the hours they considered enough to give to them, the balance of their active exercise being put into housework and "duties" generally. There was a primitive sort of lacrosse that we were addicted to, and archery, which was a graceful and quite scientific game. We had a small armoury of bows and arrows, bought cheap at the sale of the furniture of a neighbouring great house, and gave social entertainments on the strength of it while we lived at D – . Women with good figures showed to great advantage before the target, and eye and hand had to be as well trained for the bull's-eye as for the hoop or hole. It is true that archery was for the privileged well-to-do; an archery meeting usually had the background of a green and well-kept park. This rather disqualifies it for the purposes of comparison with our modern outdoor games. But those who did not have it did not miss it. There were nutting and blackberrying and mushrooming and May-daying – plenty of simple merrymakings – within reach of all.
On May mornings – oh, I wish I could have had an English May once more! – we were up with the birds and out in the fields to hunt for the first hawthorn bloom. It was one of the settled customs of the family, if not of the community. Often the morning was terribly cold, mostly the grass was reeking wet, but still the expedition was looked forward to with joy and carried through in the highest spirits. Blackthorn it was, if we found it at all, but it was not our fault if we did not return with some trophy of green bud or white flower to lay upon the breakfast-table. Later in the morning the village girls came round with their May garlands. A structure of crossed hoops of wood thickly wreathed with evergreens and artificial flowers, with a doll in the middle and any procurable odds and ends of ribbon, tinsel, or other finery, hung about it, fairly describes the sort of thing. Two girls carried it between them on a pole, and it was covered from view under a cloth until presented at your house door; the cloth was then whipped off, you gazed admiringly and, if generously disposed, or there were not too many of them, dropped a copper into an expectant hand or bag.
At any rate it was quite understood to be the right thing to take the air. We children were sent out in all weathers for our daily walk. I vividly remember crying with the cold, again and again, as I trudged along the snowy roads and through the bitter winds of those hard winters that used to be. Yet it was a wholesome practice, and we were wisely safeguarded against its risks, except in the matter of headgear, the close fit of which made our ears tender so that we suffered horribly from ear-ache, a malady unknown to the open-hatted head. On how many a night we wailed in sleep, or sobbed in our mother's arms by the fireside, with a roasted onion and a hot flannel pressed to the pain which they could not alleviate; and nobody knew the reason why.
When we went out in snow-time we wore snow-boots. They were woolly and waterproof, very thick, and were laced or buttoned over our other boots. For wet weather we had clogs – wooden soles with leather toe-caps and ankle-straps; the soles were cut with supports like the arched piers of a bridge, that lifted them an inch or two from the ground. Our elders, and especially the working women, used pattens – wooden soles again, but raised upon an iron frame and ring, and with one fixed strap which took the foot at the instep when it was thrust through. One could not imagine the rural housewife and her maids flushing their brick floors and wading through the "muck" of their farmyards without their pattens on, nor imagine another contrivance that would have answered the purpose better. Cheap, durable, put on and off in a moment, and needing no attention, they were most convenient to the wearers, and their effectiveness in keeping the feet dry and petticoats undrabbled must have made for health and cleanliness. Yet I suppose there are no clogs and pattens nowadays – I saw none; and, if so, it seems rather a pity. Things that have been improved upon ought to go, but why abandon those that still remain desirable? What is there to take the place of clogs and pattens in usefulness to the class which once wore them? Not goloshes, surely.
They were not the only sensible footgear of these days either. When the eldest aunt visited us she used to bring our supply of nursery shoes, in which five children scampering about the floors made less noise than one does now. Those shoes were woven of narrow strips of cloth in a flat basket pattern, sole and upper in one, like deerskin moccasins, and as soft; some old man in her village made them to the eldest aunt's order. But it may be that he was the sole manufacturer, whose art died with him, for I never saw their like elsewhere.
We drove as well as walked abroad. Ladies with carriages used them regularly of an afternoon, having paced their garden terraces – skirts held well above the hems of their snowy petticoats – earlier in the day. Mother and I had many outings together in the gig; either to L – , to do shopping, or to her father's house at twice the distance away. And she did not attempt to drive with one hand and hold up an umbrella with the other; indeed, she could not have done it, for the "gig-umbrella" – green cotton with a bulbous yellow handle – took a man's arm to support it. When it rained she drew a mackintosh hood from the box that was the gig seat and tied it over her bonnet, shutting everything in with a drawing-string round the face; there was also a curtain to it for the protection of neck and shoulders. Now, was not that a sensible idea? But we never wear on wet journeys a mackintosh hood or something better than a mackintosh hood, even in the dark when there is nobody to see us.
For driving in the sun she had another device. That father called it her "ugly" indicates that it was for comfort rather than adornment; yet I do not see why it particularly deserved that name, comparing it with the many things we wore – and wear – that cannot be termed beautiful. A length of soft silk, blue, green or brown, equal to the circumference of the bonnet-brim, was run through with three or four flexible ribs, cane or whalebone or steel springs. The ends of silk and ribs were drawn together and strings sewn to them; and when the article was put on it made a sun-shield for the eyes like a window-awning. I had a little one too. It clasped my little bonnet with a spring; and side by side we drove through the summer glare, sitting at ease with hands free, under a shelter better than that of the mushroom hat of a few years later. If, as I hold, the first principle of beauty is suitability, the "ugly" was not ugly, and it deserved to live. How much it might have added to the pleasure of my long Bush journeys, and detracted from the fatigue!
The memory of those drives with my mother is amongst the sweetest of my youth. I was a very little child then, yet we were perfect companions. All the way there and back we talked and talked, and never bored each other. I never knew her to "shut me up" or put me off with evasive or impatient answers. Once when she was ill and we were all bothering her at once, she exclaimed, "Oh, who would be a mother!" The words not only cut me to the heart as I heard them, but I never forgot they had been spoken; nor did she, and I do not think she forgave herself for them. It was the only instance I remember of her complaining under her burdens, which were so heavy for her strength, and especially of the cares of motherhood. Even the youngest aunt used to liken her to the fabled pelican that fed its young with its own blood. She had no life that was not lived for others, and first of all for us.
No doubt she was over-soft of heart where her darlings were concerned. For instance when we went shopping to L – we always lunched at a certain pastrycook's, in a little alcove off the shop, and on the ground that it was a holiday outing I was given my choice from the bill of fare. Mother did earnestly advise me to begin with a savoury, as she did, but there was no compulsion in the matter, and I think I made my whole meal of sweet pastry every time. What delicious three-cornered tarts those were!
And, a year ago, I was in L – , and I looked for that pastrycook's shop – and found it!
But the intellectual pleasures of the road rivalled the material joys of the restaurant. She used to tell me stories of the places we passed, grown-up stories, and not the faked stuff that children are so commonly befooled with. I always knew at the time that I could trust every word she said, and when I grew up I never had to learn that she had deceived me. Even our frequent babies were not found under gooseberry bushes or brought in the doctor's pocket; that "God sent them," and that I should "know more about it some day" was her account of the phenomenon – puzzling, of course, but less so than the monstrous and conflicting statements of monthly nurse and servants. When the eighth (there being two more still to follow) was on the way, I was privately informed beforehand. "Our secret," mother called it; and while she made its earthly garments under my eye, we spent blissful hours building air-castles for its habitation, in the strictest confidence.
On our way to her father's house we passed a dark, still pool, sunk within precipitous walls of earth that looked as if they might have been those of an excavated quarry – a most fascinating spot. The Bride's Pool, it was called. Once upon a time, she told me, a bride and bridegroom were driving from church after their wedding and a great storm came on. The horses took fright at the thunder and lightning, and backed the carriage off the road and over the bank into the water-hole, and the bridal pair were drowned. The details of the tragedy lived in my mind for ever – how they loved each other, how their new home was waiting for them and they never entered it, how they were fished up together, clasped tight in each other's arms. Then there was the Heath (M. drove me to the edge of it, behind her own old fat pony), the furzy, lonely, wind-swept waste where the rabbits lived, a shuddery place that we liked to be well past before dark. For there was a time when a gibbet stood there, and skeleton men hung on it in an iron frame that creaked and clanked in the windy nights. She did not mind harrowing my infant soul with fore-knowledge of the world's agonies, and I do not know that she was wrong. It must have been an extreme devotion to my good that caused her to leave me behind with my grandparents and return the long way alone, as she often did.
If I was spoiled at home I was doubly spoiled with them. Even the stern grandfather gave me his gold seals and his historic snuff-box to play with. There was a wondrous scent, compounded of pot-pourri (in the room with the cabinets of china), lavender (in the linen press and drawers), heliotrope (beneath the windows), and something sweeter but indescribable (in grandmother's store-room), which differentiated that house from every other that I have known. I longed to see it again when I was actually on the road to it, but we were not out with Mr B. and his strong horse this time, and M.'s pony was too old and too petted to toddle any farther than the edge of the Heath.
To this day the smell of "cherry-pie," one element only, reminds me of the place and nothing else. It was a sweet place indeed when the youngest aunt was away from it – the eldest aunt mothered motherless cousins elsewhere – and I am happy now to have been there, if I was not quite happy at the time. I ought to have been happy, with such petting and such surroundings, but I do remember that I was homesick. The beautiful lawn, sloping from the house to the road, ended on the top of a stone wall, and I was told not to stray so far, lest I should tumble over; but secretly I strayed there often, to look along the road for a gig and a white horse. That was the great day – when mother arrived to fetch me home.
Dear old home, that to all appearances had not changed a bit! Dear old barn, with its warm, mealy, delicious odours, and its statuesque owl on the dark rafter overhead – outwardly the same as ever. Why, here again we had no end of invigorating sport and active exercise. Hard work was done there and few amusements were more amusing than to watch it a-doing, sitting well out of the way on an upturned "skep" or a pile of empty sacks. I have seen men using the flail on wheat and barley like bush fire-fighters beating out flames; and I have seen a sort of windlass thing with horses turning spokes and a man and whip in the middle, operating outside the barn a simple mechanism within, the first improvement upon the flail; but I also remember, even at T – , the hum of the tall-chimneyed travelling engine that performed all its duty in the fields, herald of the modern method, so wonderful and admirable, yet apparently so devoid of attraction for a child. There was rat-catching in that barn – the most fascinating of amusements. Little girls managed to slip in with little boys when friendly servants summoned them to the fray. A professional rat-catcher attended. Oh, the thrilling moment when he unslung the box from his back and allowed us to look at his ferrets, writhing together in the straw like eels. And when his assistants, with their sticks and dogs, were marshalled at their posts, and the sinuous, sleek bodies were sent down the holes, the breathless waiting for smothered squeaks below, for the dramatic bolt of rats into the open – poor things whose point of view was no more considered than was that of table fowls and calves (the former used to be killed horribly by having knives thrust down their throats, being then left to hang head downwards and bleed until life was drained out of them; and the latter were bled to death also, although not with such monstrous cruelty, the object in both cases being to have flesh white for table; and we, so tender-hearted for our pets, could watch the callous executioner and the long agony he inflicted) – I do not know a more enjoyable sport for those who have not developed the idea that dumb things feel as we do. At other times the owls in the barn roof hunted the rats and mice. I have seen their eyes in the dark, and the ghostly passing of their uncanny wings that make no sound. When the barn was empty what a place for games and romps!
Then we had the great Fair of the county, an event to which we looked forward, as we also looked back, for the whole year. The "Mart," with its entrancing canvas galleries full of tops, work-boxes, every beautiful thing that heart of childhood could desire, its peepshows and merry-go-rounds, its Richardson's marionettes, its Wombwell's menagerie – the thought of it must bring a glow to the heart of any Norfolk native who knew it when I did. All right-minded parents took their offspring to the Mart, if it was physically possible to take them, and I am clear in my mind (though I was afraid to inquire when I was there) that nothing to compare with it exists in England to-day. The fair itself may exist, for what I know (its charter was granted by Henry the Eighth), but if it does it will be but the gibbering shade of its former self, lagging superfluous; for its human complement has for ever passed away. I have heard my parents say that their parents went to it to buy those silk dresses and those china tea-services which were family treasures and heirlooms from generation to generation. We went to it for dolls and Noah's Arks and tin trumpets and wooden tea-things, driving home with armfuls of delight through many miles of snow or biting wind, cuddled down in our wraps within the hood of the "sociable." The Mart was "proclaimed" on the Tuesday following St Valentine's Day, and continued for, I think, three weeks afterwards.
Well, then came May Day and the garlands; Easter celebrated by the wearing for the first time of our new spring Sunday clothes – white bonnets to be quite correct; the "haysel" which meant warm days for romps in the fragrant cocks; the seaside – greatest bliss of all.
Summer, with its long light, its apparently few resources for killing time, did not weary us, that I remember. In the summer holidays, when we lived at D – , my brothers used to sit on a river bank and watch the floats of their fishing lines from dawn to dusk, often without getting a bite, and did not consider the day wasted. Little females had their dolls to take a-walking, their hoops and skipping-ropes, and battledore and shuttlecock, their dumb pets to rear, their little garden plots to weed and till. Their elders were satisfied to sit under trees when work was done, with needle or pipe or book – for we did have books. A little amusement seemed to go such a long, long way.
Then autumn – harvesting, blackberrying…
I do not know how I acquired the idea that I should find the old blackberry hedges, the sweet masses of hawthorn and dog-rose and bindweed and nightshade and all those old hedgy things, swept away by the hand of the progressive agriculturist, but such had been my belief long before my return home. In the second chapter of my book of Australian reminiscences I now read with a blush my ignorant lament over "beauty vanishing from the world" in the shape of sailing ships, the Pink Terraces of New Zealand, and the big bird-thronged hedges of rural England. I suppose I reckoned on the methods of high farming being much the same in all countries, without allowing for the good taste and reverent conservatism of English landlords. The hedges were all there still, more beautiful to me than ever, and I went blackberrying with a basket, just as I had done as a child.
Harvesting – I saw it again on the old lands. I was in the midst of it, reminded at every turn of the old times. But there were no children playing amongst the shocks and stacks, no reapers with sickles, or gleaners filling their turned-up skirts with the scatterings left behind; the mechanical reaper gathered every straw. And there was no Harvest Home. The village churches all had their Harvest Festivals, exactly like ours in Australia; but the procession of the Last Waggon through the golden fields, the Harvest Supper – they are gone with the piquant Valentine and the jovial Waits, to return no more.
I looked at the barn, where we used to celebrate the arrival of the Last Load. I looked at the coach-house – neither of them altered in the least, that I could see – where the memorable banquets had taken place. I used to go to them, under my father's wing; at any rate, I must have gone to one, for nothing is clearer to the eye of memory than the picture of the rustic faces around the festive table. Husbands in clean smock-frocks and wives in their Sunday best, no sociological knowledge in their heads, no divine discontent in their souls, to impair their enjoyment of "the master's" hospitality. Unlimited home-brewed was dispensed to them with the roast beef and plum pudding, but I remember no rowdiness in consequence; only clouds of smoke, a succession of highly proper songs, and vociferous applause of the performers. It was etiquette for all to "favour the company" who could, and each singer seemed to have his own one song, listened to by his fellows with unwearied interest and appreciation year after year. As regularly as harvest and harvest supper came round, we had "the highten days o' June" from the oldest throat that could pipe a quavering note:
"In the highten days o' June
Napoleon did advance – "
That is all I remember of his song, the first line of which originally ran: "On the eighteenth day of June." My father had his "Simon the Cellarer," or what not, to contribute to the programme, and smoked his pipe and drank his beer with his men, and appeared to enjoy himself as much as they did.
Now, in the interest of good-fellowship and good cheer, we have the Harvest Festival, from which the agricultural labourer is conspicuously absent, as a rule.
However, the inevitable is the inevitable. The past is past. As all the conditions of that old time hung together, together they had to go. And there is still a Future for the unborn to experiment in.
Harvest Home having been celebrated, the "master" was free to make holiday with horse and gun, and my father was ever eager – too eager – to do so. Weather that was right for hunting was a matter of more joyful satisfaction to him than weather that was right for crops. All thought of crops was thrown to the autumn winds as soon as "the season" opened.
Those old roads of Norfolk were to me haunted with hounds and red coats, echoing with the music of the pack and the horn. I asked Mr B., as he was driving me from D – to my cousin's house, how hunting stood in the old hunting county now. He shook his head mournfully. According to him, although he was still a young man, the heydey again was gone, never to return.
He had it in his blood, like me, from the dead and gone, and so we were more or less prejudiced. But it would seem clear to the understanding of the most unbiassed person that the sport must have been more interesting in the old times, if only for the reason that hunting men did not wedge in hunting with a dozen other diversions, often in half-a-dozen different places; they gave their hearts and the season to it, falling back upon a little placid subsidiary shooting (over dogs) on off days. There were fewer railways and miscellaneous lions in the path of the straight run; there were more foxes, "stout" in proportion to the healthy peacefulness of their bringing up. Townsfolk did not "run down" in crowds to a country meet – they could not; the uninitiated outsider who did intrude where he was not wanted accepted the stern discipline of the field as part of the natural order. Farmers were similarly old-fashioned, and in easier circumstances; they were insiders moreover, although few of them aspired to the red coat – as fine riders and steady-going sportsmen as their landlords. They bred hunters and took puppies to walk, and farmed land so that it was not too fine to be galloped over. And barbed wire had not been invented.
Let me hasten to say, however, that I, personally, do not regret the inevitable change. In spite of my feelings on those haunted Norfolk roads, and my talk with Mr B., my heart does not sympathise with mourners over the decadence of the old sport. The beginnings of the heresy that the morals of "sport" in this form are open to doubt – that animals, after all, have some poor rights – seem to be welcome signs of progress on the true line of civilisation. Heresies of to-day have a fashion of changing into orthodox beliefs to-morrow, and this heresy is bound to follow the rule. Hunting that is not for food or in self-defence is like war – a relic of the savage state, surviving only because its nobler attendant features, its refined conventions, traditions and associations disguise the savagery.
I have seen an exhausted fox making a last spurt for his life, brush down, tongue out, coat wet, eyes wild with despair; and I am glad to think that, after all these years, it is possible for the human heart to feel a stir of pity for him. It felt none then. My gentle mother, who had followed the hounds herself in days of better health and fewer babies, loved to pack her little brood into a phaeton and drive them to some likely spot for seeing something of that brutally unfair contest between an army of giants and one little scrap of heroic life. I vividly remember an occasion when the horse in the shafts happened to be an old hunter of her own, supposed to have outlived his enthusiasm. At the first sound of the distant chase he propped as if shot, with pricked ears and snorting nostrils, and then bounded at a closed gate, with the intent to go over it, phaeton and children and all. It took a good horsewoman to deal with that situation, and she managed to prevent trouble by hastily detaching him from the carriage and hanging on to him until the hunt had passed.
After that Taffy took us on these expeditions. How perfectly I recall a still, soft day, a quiet road intersecting deep woods – a road dark in summer with the leafage of overarching trees – the phaeton with the white pony drawn up under the hedge, the mellow hunting cry of the pack sounding nearer and nearer, the speckle of red coats appearing and disappearing through the skeleton copse, the excitement, the rapture, the triumph – and a poor little drabbled fox struggling to evade his fate. He broke from the further hedge, crossed the road, and entered the hedge beside us almost under Taffy's nose – one of the most sensational incidents of a hunting season that I can remember falling to the lot of us non-combatants. Dead beat he was, his heart bursting, his limbs scarce able to carry him; yet even tender-hearted women and children had no feeling for him in his lonely fight against the forces of the universe, no chivalrous impulse to befriend him in his extremity. A pair of horsemen crashed through the opposite hedge into the road – Lord S. had lost his cap, and his hair was wild about his head – and they reined up to speak to us. To their excited "Where? Where?" we shouted "There! There!" and pointed them after the fugitive. And if he fell into the jaws of the hounds at last I am sure we congratulated ourselves on having helped to put him there.
I passed the very spot that afternoon, and it was just the same; only now it rained, and the trees were in full leaf, and there was no fox, nor hound, nor horse.
The dignified figure in the Hunt is, of course, the last-named animal. He never sees the quarry, probably, or knows there is one, or cares. It is not the lust of chasing and killing that inspires him to his gallant deeds – neither in fox-hunting nor in war. Watch a soldier's horse in the evolutions of a review. A colonel of my acquaintance has told me that the moment the band of the regiment begins to play he feels his charger's heart bound against his boot; so it is the music of the pack, telling of glorious effort and exercise, which fires the blood of the hunting horse that only hunts by proxy. The "scent of battle" is the scent of the old primitive life in free air and space, the "Call of the Wild" to the still half-tamed.