The Retrospect

Two other marked traits of the grandfather's character are noted by his biographer – a great love of music and a great love of animals. It is mentioned that the guard of the mail-coach always began to play on his bugle when approaching the house, and the tune was "The Old English Gentleman" when passing it. "His kindness to animals was such that he had them often given to him when aged, from its being known that he never sold an old horse, and so they were sure to end their days with him." And "Shortly before his death, he asked for the curtains to be drawn aside that he might have a last look at the scene of his old labours, and he said, 'There are my sheep, pretty creatures!'"

It is evident that in his later life he was a distinguished county man. He was for many years agent for the trustees of large fen properties, and the agencies of some of the most important estates in Norfolk were offered him after he had retired from such duties. When the W – property, which had been his first charge, was sold again, "The measuring up, the valuation of the timber, and the price to be fixed on the whole estate, was left to his judgment." I have read some of his business letters, and they seemed to me models of what such should be. At Agricultural Society dinners, and other public functions, honour was paid him in complimentary speeches. "You must not consider what Mr C.'s farming is now, with all the improvements that have taken place of late, but as I remember him and his farm years ago, when no one but him clayed land, underdrained, or clipped hedges." And so on. In his eighty-second year he was presented by his friends with his portrait in oils, accompanied by the following address: —

"Dear Sir, – As a testimony of our esteem for the valuable services you have rendered to Agriculture during a residence of upwards of eighty years in the same locality, in converting an unproductive waste into a fertile country, and especially as the originator of the beneficial system of deep underdraining, claying and the management of fences, now generally followed – as a benefactor of the labourer, a kind neighbour and a sincere friend – we respectfully beg to present the accompanying Portrait, painted by Ambrosini Jerome, Esqr., portrait painter to her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent, as an Heirloom to your family, with an assurance that they will ever regard it as a noble example of a parent who has raised himself by his science, diligence and integrity from a humble position to affluence and respectability and honour, and with our sincere wishes that you may long live to enjoy the merited reward of an active, useful and well-spent life. We are," etc.

And the names of leading Norfolk are appended.

I saw that portrait, still hanging in its old place, in the dining-room where M. and I had tea with the great-grandson and his family (our coachman, quite at home in the house that had sheltered generations of his family also, had put up his carriage and was enjoying himself in the kitchen), and I noted the same fault that had struck us when it was new – the common fault of painted portraits – a lack of the virile force that gave character to his face even in extreme old age. Otherwise it was a good likeness. He holds the appropriate swath of ripe wheat in one wrinkled hand, the heavy ears supported on the other – a nobler emblem than any Heralds' College could have given him.

The great-grandson did not know, until I (who had just found it out) told him, that the picture was an heirloom and no property of his, he being but the son of a younger granddaughter. He could not tell me how it came to be still in its old place, but I could tell him. It really belongs to America. Years ago – about ten or thereabouts – I had a letter from a cousin who had emigrated to the States in his youth, recalling himself to my memory for the first time since we were children together, meeting at the grandfather's armchair at R – on Sunday afternoons. I could not quite identify him, but my public position as a writer had supplied him with a clue to me. In this letter, which contained photographs of his home and children and details of his American life, he mentioned that he was now the head of the family and legal owner of the grandfather's portrait. It had come to him since he had emigrated, and he had never gone back, and never expected to go back; but he had an idea that I was going back, and he formally made over the picture to me. He asked me to find it, and take it, and keep it. He seemed to have lost touch and knowledge of his English connections in the course of so many years, but to feel that he had found a tangible, or, at any rate, authentic representative of them in me. If I would accept the treasure, he would be sure that it was in safe keeping – or something to that effect. In writing back to him, I, of course, refused it. I told him I was far less likely to return to England than he was, and that in any case I was not in the "line of succession"; and I heard no more about it. A year or two later I received a newspaper from his family announcing his death; then I had a letter from his son. Did I know where the portrait was? Did I know this and that and the other about the family? I could see that this young American had been nursed on legends of country seats and ancestors of the romantic pattern, that his father in his new country had idealised the old, as I had, and, unlike me, had impressed his unconscious exaggerations upon the imaginations of his children. "I am now the head of the family," wrote the young man, as if we were in the Peerage. I had to reply to him that I did not know where the portrait was, that I did not know anything about the family in England, and that nothing seemed more unlikely than that I ever should.

Now here I was, at the fountain-head of knowledge, and there was the portrait, benignly – too benignly – looking down upon me from the wall.

There, too, was the spot where the old armchair had stood. I, like my American cousin, had remembered the room surrounding it as a spacious apartment, with accommodation for a great deal of massive mahogany furniture; it had dwindled surprisingly. I thought there was a big hall, a wide staircase – and the hall was but the ordinary passage-way, and the stairs steep and cramped and twisty. I could have sworn there was a stone-pillared portico to the front door; it was a brick porch under the creepers. Well, well! It was a sweet old house, even in its reduced condition, and I had a charming time in it. They gave us a delicious tea, strawberries and raspberries (what a strawberry summer that was! I had never had quite as many as I could eat before), with unlimited cream, and thin bread-and-butter, and cakes of melting richness; and I was in the pink of health, when nothing could hurt me. After tea we strolled about the garden, grandfather's own old garden, and the dear little great-great-grandson, who as a memory can hold his own with all the ghosts behind him, ran hither and thither to gather flowers for me until I was loaded up with more than I could carry. Fain would I have had him temper zeal with discretion, but it was useless effort, and his mother would not back me.

Then, in the afterglow of the summer evening, the children were sent to the nursery, our hostess got the keys of the church, and we went across the park-like fields to the road, on the other side of which is the burial-place of the wicked squire who was so "very offensive" in various ways, and of the good old farmer, whose memory is as green as the land he tilled so righteously, his example as fruitful, his honoured name as sweet.

He died on the 9th October 1856, in his eighty-seventh year. "Around him in R – churchyard," says the memoir, "and near him, lie his old servants, on whose gravestones are recorded their faithfulness and length of service." I saw them all; D., who died before I was born, "after thirty-five years' service"; old C.B., who died the year after his master, after "upwards of fifty years' service"; M.B., the housekeeper who gave us cakes on Sundays, four generations of whose family, daughter following mother, filled the office of nurse in successive households of ours. The many graves of aunts and uncles and cousins (my own parents lie elsewhere) were not half so touching. Old B.'s death was said to have occurred as a direct consequence of his master's; it was the fall of one that broke down the other. B. was rather an arbitrary person, as we children knew him. He ordered us about as if the place was his – practically it was; no one but my grandfather could successfully dispute his authority. But he was wrapped up in us all; the family was his family, as it had been for "upwards of fifty years"; and his master was his king who could do no wrong. My father and grey-headed uncles were summoned to his dying bed – they had not quarrelled then – and he formally blessed them as grandfather had blessed me. "My boys," he murmured, "my boys!" His mumbled last words were, "I brought 'em all up."

It was hard to tear myself from these eloquent memorials, which I was looking upon for the first time, as doubtless it was the last. All around the little graveyard was green country – that lovely English green of velvet grass and noble trees which, after a month of it, was still an ever-fresh rapture to my Australian eyes. "An unproductive waste," it was said to have been, prior to the famous underdraining and claying; could my grandfather have seen it with me, he would have felt satisfied with his work, although not a town, or a railroad, or even a telegraph wire, was in sight.

But there was the little church to revisit yet – another shrine of memory. As I walked up the aisle and looked about me, I saw that in half-a-century the hand of change had scarcely touched it. It was a new church, with the exception of the Norman doorway, when I made its acquaintance as a child taken there by its nurse, and it started with the open benches and stencilled walls that were novelties of fashion then. There they were, the same, to the very pattern and hues of the mural decoration, which showed no sign either of renewal or decay. The armorial shields (to the memory of pious benefactors, doubtless), painted in their proper colours, that made a cornice to the little apse that formed the chancel, were each in its old place, tilted forward at the same angle; I recognised them all. Many a tedious hour had they relieved, as pictures to be studied and puzzled over – the breed of the various heraldic animals, the reasons of their parti-coloured coats and antic attitudes, and so on.

And what a procession of quaint figures passed before me as I stood at the upper end, where we had our family pew, and looked down at the open door through which the dead and gone flocked in! The aged labourers, soaped and oiled, in their clean smock-frocks with the wonderful stitchery on back and front; the neat old women, who unwrapped their church books from their clean pocket-handkerchiefs when service began, and wrapped them up again as soon as it was over; the village dressmaker, who sat just behind us, and whose stylish costumes I used to study through the back of our seat while kneeling on my hassock the reverse way to her – memorable chiefly for puffy white muslin undersleeves that were kept up with elastic which showed when she covered her face with her hands, and had wristbands with black velvet run through the holes in them; the organist at his little instrument near the entrance (it is in another place now, and is not played by turning a handle, as in his time); the inevitable schoolmaster with his indispensable long cane; the servant girls and their swains, the numerous child cousins, etc., etc. – a throng of ghosts. But there was one great and sensational event connected with my early attendances at this church, matching that of the raven in the other, only in this case tragedy instead of comedy; and I was looking at it the whole time, as at a cinematograph reproduction of the living scene.

A young curate (as usual at the unimportant afternoon services) was preaching – how plainly I see him, with his pallid, tawny face and soft black eyes – and suddenly stopped dead and stood still, simply staring at the congregation. "Oh," I thought, staring back at him from my commanding position below, "what news to take home to father and mother, that Mr H. has done this funny thing!" He was recently from India, recruiting delicate health, which was already the anxious care of the ladies of the parish, who sent broths and jellies to his lodgings and coddled him at their homes as often as he would come to them. My mother and M.'s mother were his chief friends, and we children, with whom he had played, were very fond of him. Still it was pure enjoyment to me to see him stop in the middle of his sermon, and to realise that he was not going to finish it. Poor fellow! It was the end of his preaching and of his work. He said, after that long, exciting pause – the words are as unforgettable as Canon W.'s "Bong on to him!" – "I must crave your indulgence, for I can get no further." With that he fell and disappeared. Some men rushed from their seats, dragged him out of the pulpit, and carried him, insensible, from the church; and the congregation broke up and scattered, we hurrying home at a run to tell the news. My mother at once put on her bonnet and went away to nurse him. All the village ladies became his mothers from that day until his death, when the whole parish wept and wailed for him and refused to be comforted. His memory was canonised amongst us. A memoir of him was published by his unknown kindred, containing a steel-engraved portrait (not a bit like him, for it made him fair and fat), and, scattered through the latter pages, allusions to "Mrs H.C." and "Mrs F.C." rendered the book peculiarly precious to two of the bereaved families. The only way that succeeding curates could make themselves tolerable was by confessing freely that they knew themselves unworthy to fill his place. I remember Mr R., his immediate successor, standing in our dining-room (it was his first visit as our pastor) and avowing, with dramatic earnestness, that the latchet of Mr H.'s shoes he was not worthy to unloose. He became a very dear friend, however, Mr R. He was a jolly, hearty, healthy fellow, splendid to play with, with no sadness and no conspicuous saintliness about him.

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!