The Retrospect

Never, said his daughters, would he live in any place that was not beautiful.

Well, in Devonshire, at any rate, he had not done so. My spacious room had a great bay of three windows, in which I could sit and batten on beauty to my heart's content. My writing-table stood in one angle, and I could not get on with my letters of a morning for the enchantment of the view. Deep down below me lay a small exquisite lawn (every English lawn is exquisite), shadowed at one side with fine old trees, and all around with a beflowered wall; the old gardener was always pottering there, shaving the grass a little every day, sweeping up every dead leaf that autumn wind brought down. Below the garden again was the sunk road, so deep and steep that I should not have known there was a road but for hearing a carriage now and then and getting a glimpse of the top of the coachman's hat. The farther wall lining the ravine showed just its stone coping at the top, and beyond that was sea – all sea, with the wall cutting across it – unless I turned my eyes to the left, where a splendid red bluff breasted it. Could even Devonshire have composed a lovelier picture to live with? But I am bound to admit that, three mornings out of four, when I got up to look at it, it was lost in fog. However, on the day of my arrival, when the evening light was peculiar, I saw Portland through a telescope; and Portland, I was told, was full forty miles off, and not visible from where we saw it above once in as many years. I did see it, but it was not so clear as the old "Stump" on the sea-line that I had looked at from the beach in Norfolk.

Dear M. was determined I should lose nothing of the joy of Devonshire through default of hers; and, with carriage closed, we spent the first two pouring wet days exploring the lovely neighbourhood. It was lovely in the most hopeless downpour. Then came fine weather, and she took me to Exeter. As originally arranged, the plan was not only to "do" Exeter, but also Ottery St Mary, the last home and grave of my grandmother. But when we reached the cathedral city, a long journey, there was so much to see and do that even to me it seemed bad economy to tax time, strength and pleasurable sensation further. I said, "Oh, this is enough for one day!" and we agreed to make it so.

I suppose it would be sinking to the deeps of drivel to say "How beautiful Exeter is," but such is my opinion, all the same. And I walked about it, as I did about most places that I visited in England, with invisible companions, whose presence enhanced its charms. Years and years ago – when I was at B – , between '75 and '78 – a dear friend of mine was an old lady of about eighty, the first English lady on the goldfields, who was said to be, and must have been, the handsomest and most delightful woman of that age known to Australian history. She was Devonshire born, and her old husband – a solicitor, who had returned to the practice of his profession when goldfields went out of fashion with his class – told me she had been known as the "Belle of Exeter" in the long ago when he had married her. She loved to talk to me of the Australian "old days," but also she loved to go further back, and tell me of Devonshire and her native city, always winding up with injunctions to me to go there if I ever returned to my native land again. And here I was at last, finding all her loving pride in the place justified.

Could anything in city planning be happier in effect than the position of the cathedral in its quiet oasis amid the streets? And what a cathedral, inside and out! I have a cathedral that I call my own, and never thought I should so overcome the power of patriotic prejudice as to admit it could be surpassed by another. But when I returned to Ely last time, looking for my shrine of all perfection, I got a shock to my housewifely sensibilities from its ill-kept condition that wholly unhinged the long-established point of view. The beautiful brasswork was black and green, the beautiful oak carving outlined in grey dust, and in that state I could not take pleasure in looking at them, even for old time's sake. Perhaps they were waiting for some restorations to be done with before turning to with the pails and brooms and chamois-leathers. But all service-time I used to be catching myself absorbed, not in prayers and sermon, but in anxious inward debate as to whether it was not already too late ever to make those brass gates bright again.

There was no dirt in Exeter Cathedral to dim its complete and finished loveliness, and all its surroundings were in character and keeping with it, "composed" by time and circumstance to make the picture perfect – especially on a golden autumn day. What should be the cast of mind of a bishop privileged to live in such a house and grounds as lie, peaceful and stately and exquisite, under the shadow of the south tower? I like to remember that one bishop of Exeter had a son who was the father of my Eden Phillpotts, whose intellectual inheritance is the love of beauty, uncloistered, unsophisticated; beauty at its primal source in the breast of Mother Nature. M. and I pottered about these precincts, still thinking we were going on to Ottery St Mary, until the spirit of the place so possessed me that I could not tear myself away.

"Oh, this is enough for one day!" I said to M.

She understood, and we stayed, and let Exeter soak in.

She took me to one place and another, and one was the old "Mol's Coffee House" that flourished as such in the sixteenth century, but had been a private house at the time of the Armada. It is now in the occupation of a firm of picture-dealers, who also have the sole right of selling a certain pottery ware of local manufacture. M. was interested in a collection of water-colours they had on view – she is herself a charming water-colourist – but the setting of those pictures was the picture of them all. We climbed a little, dark, twisty oaken staircase that had echoed to the tread of Drake and Raleigh – the self-same stairs, just as when they clattered up and down; and we stood in the self-same oak-panelled chamber where they met their fellow-defenders of England's shores, to discuss and arrange plans for circumventing the enemy. I looked up from the water-colours of to-day to the age-bleached colours of their shields of arms in the age-blackened oak, and thought of those bygone committee meetings. Nothing changed since then, except the living air, and those who breathed it, and their use of the old place. It could not be put to better use. The firm in possession, who deal in art, are artistic enough to respect the relic in their care. The spirits of Drake and Monk and Raleigh, and the rest, might come o' nights to the old rendezvous, and not feel they had no business to be there. In that room I bought a packet of picture post cards – views of Exeter – that, artistically considered, are the best I found in England. Whenever I took one out to scribble on, I put it back in the envelope again, as too good to be defaced in the post and thrown away, and the package is still intact.

Then we went to a shop and I bought an umbrella. Does that seem an incongruous association of ideas? Nothing of the sort. The pleasure I have had, and still have, out of that umbrella, because of the place I bought it in, you would not believe. My hand fondles it every time I wrap its folds around its stick; I cannot put the loop over the button, or take it off, without all the loveliness of Exeter flooding my soul, the memories of that day.

Between luncheon and tea we attended a missionary festival service in the cathedral. It was a Pan-Anglican side-show, not to speak irreverently, with the usual miscellaneous assortment of bishops in attendance. One met the swarming prelates here and there, in the houses of their hostesses, and in places remote from the London centre which had lately been the seething whirlpool of episcopal affairs; and, without going to one of their great programme meetings, I came to know a few, one from the other, and to take an interest in some. For instance, in an American bishop, one of the most vigorous and alert-minded, as he was one of the youngest, a "live" man, who seemed eloquent in his own person of the country he came from; in a black bishop from Africa, who one day waited with me for a long time in the outer shop of a firm of clerical tailors, while my husband (frightfully particular about the cut and set of coats) was being attended to within; above all, in a nice man from India, with whom I spent an evening, mostly on a sofa-for-two, in a London drawing-room. It has been my good fortune to make friends with several bishops, never as bishops, always as unprofessional men. They are bishops who talk shop to me before they are my friends, not afterwards. And I can say of each one of the few who have honoured me by meeting me on my own ground, that as men they are (were, in the case of one long dead and two at the end of life) delightful. You would not think it, viewing bishops, as one does, altogether from the outside; but so it is. On this occasion at Exeter, it was one of our own Australasian prelates who preached the sermon. I did not know him, as bishop or man, and there was not much in his discourse, and I do not like sermons anyhow; rather, I feel that they have outstayed their usefulness, which was doubtless great when the preachers were more learned than those they preached to; but it was an hour and a half of physical repose and spiritual contentment, and I much enjoyed it.

Straight from the cathedral we went to our tea, the – But no, I will not say it again. After this refreshment we walked about a little more, and there comes to mind a delicious little shop in an alley leading out of the cathedral yard; it sold Devonshire junket and cream and butter, as well as other dairy dainties, some of which were handed to us in card boxes with ribbon handles that were a pleasure to carry the long way home. Also I recall a moment of astonishment at finding that prawns in England were considered cheap at tenpence a dozen. They were exposed on an Exeter market stall at that figure. "Goodness gracious! Do you mean to say those we had at lunch yesterday were that price?" I questioned M., horror-stricken to think how lightheartedly I had ladled them on to my plate, as mere prawns such as went by the name at home, only bigger. Then she told me that her domestic fishmonger charged a penny apiece. And when you think of the importance of pennies in England! I made a mental calculation that at least seven shillings had been sunk in the little dishful that I had reckoned as worth sixpence perhaps – because the prawns were so exceptionally fine.

It was dark when we reached Exeter station, and we had to wait there for our train. We sat down to dinner, without dressing, at a few minutes to nine.

On another day M. took me to Plymouth, the special place of memories, the "take off" for my youthful leap into the unknown world. "Shall I ever see it again?" I asked myself, as I watched it fade in rain on the tragical morning of my departure; and how small a chance there was that I ever should! It was typically spring-time then. Now it was typically autumn.

The heavy fog in which the September day was born yielded to the sun before we started on our expedition, and we had again the sweet English weather that was peculiar to that year. We drove to Cockington before leaving the carriage at Torquay, and Cockington was another place of beauty that I had kept thought of through all my adult life. A friend of mine had wintered at Torquay in the long ago, and in daily letters at the time had word-painted all the neighbourhood for me, supplementing his descriptions with photographs, which adorn a girlish album to this day; and so I knew Cockington well at second hand. But that was not like seeing it on a lovely morning such as this. We left the carriage to walk up the lane of the Forge and through the Park to the little artist's dream of a church, and we poked about inside it, while the lady of the keys jubilated in subdued tones over the recent birth of an heir to the lands it stood on. "These woods,", said M., as we drove away along the narrow, deep-sunk roads, "are thick with snowdrops in the spring." Heavens! What must Cockington be in spring?

Then we took train at Torquay for Plymouth, and there I was again on the old via dolorosa, which was that no more. Ivy Bridge, in the shining morning, welcomed me back, all smiles; and the country, which I really saw for the first time, filled me with delight. So richly green, where it was not so richly red! And why have I never seen such cows as those splendid, big, red Devon cows elsewhere? If this is the type of creature bred from Devon soil, the heroic history of the county is explicable – not to mention the quality of its cream.

Shades of heroes were all about us as we perambulated Plymouth town, but all the time I was thinking of a pair of poor young things putting in a last morning (after a bedless and sleepless night) roaming the same old streets, close on forty years ago. I could recognise little beyond the general features of the place, however. The town must have greatly altered since 1870, and the fact is evidenced by the complexion of its more prominent buildings. The great Guildhall was not, nor the second Eddystone lamp-post in the sea; even the Armada Memorial was not, nor the statue of Sir Francis Drake, though one would have expected to recall them, weather-worn and venerable, as having dominated the Hoe for centuries before that. But we have fine modern halls and monuments of our own, and it is the Historic Past in which I live when I have the opportunity; so I turned from the great Guildhall to the grey church alongside, which enshrined the story of seven centuries within its still stout walls. And when I stood on the Hoe, it was not to look at new statues and lighthouses, but across the unchanging Sound, where once lay a "fine new clipper" (as the papers described her); waiting for a wind to waft her on her maiden voyage round the world. She was a vessel of little more than a thousand tons, and hardly visible to the naked eye from that point of view – then. But I saw her ghost in September last, as plain as plain could be.

Then we had a long afternoon at Kingswear and Dartmouth – a still more satisfying experience, if that could be. They are both so old, so beautifully unmodernised and unimproved, cherishing the Historic Past so faithfully! The Naval College, above and apart, does not interfere with it in the least. We "did" Dartmouth first – cradle of the British seafarer from time immemorial – and it was an æsthetic luxury indeed to potter about that old, old church in its old, old graveyard, between which and the houses snuggled up to it a narrow, deep-sunken, paved passage gave right of way to living neighbours, case-hardened against the toxic microbe in all its forms, one must suppose. The rood-screen still bore what I had never seen on rood-screen yet; the figures of the two thieves as well as that of the Saviour – the Calvary complete. The pulpit was the gift of King Charles the First, and apparently in its original state, less the colour and sharp outlines that time had worn away. It is of carved stone, gilded and coloured, shaped like a wineglass, and one wondered that even a small man should dare to trust his weight in it. I could not realise a modern preacher there, or a modern congregation. I should expect to see Richard the Lion Heart and his knights stride in, to be blessed before starting out of harbour for the Crusades; at the least – or, rather, the latest – the Pilgrim Fathers kneeling together, seeking strength to set forth on their equally gallant enterprise.

And those quaint, steep, curly streets, and those old timbered houses, with their projecting upper storeys, all carved and crinkled – they are the same the Pilgrim Fathers said good-bye to, and in which their kin may have lived for centuries before that. The harbour itself has not been altered since King Richard sailed out of it in 1190 – so they say, and nothing appears to the contrary. Imagine the seafaring history it has made, the sailor life it has seen! Those very stones that you see and touch and walk about on to-day, those very waters where the Britannia and Hindostan now lie! M. and I had luncheon in a long room, by a window overlooking the quay, and a dozen imaginary pageants of the past entertained my fancy as I ate, looking out upon the now quiet place. There was another wide window at the other end of the long room, and that one gave immediately upon the churchyard. Below it ran the sunk passage which did duty for a street – two people could just about pass each other and nearly on a level with its sill the ancient gravestones presented themselves to view, almost within touch, against the background of that church which seemed to have been there for ever. I think I remember that gravestones of great antiquity lined the passage walls and made a pediment to the window of the restaurant. Could anything be more appropriate to the character of the town?

When we had explored Dartmouth, as far as time allowed, the ferry-boat took us back to Kingswear, where we proposed to have tea with a lady living up on the hill. Here the modern came in, but not until we wanted it – with the soft sofa and the recreative cup. Kingswear keeps its mate over the way in countenance. The new homes tuck themselves unobtrusively into sylvan nooks that soften or hide them – or so it seemed; I must confess that it was tea-time, and I did not take much notice. Besides, the way to the house of M.'s friend was so steep and so striking that I was bound to confine my attention to it. Tier above tier, up shadowed shrubbery pathways and mossed stone stairways, the various footholds of the garden were laboriously gained. The approach reminded me of some I had heard or read or seen pictures of, leading to villas on Italian heights. It was very pretty, and the house when we reached it was more than that. We had but half-an-hour there before we had to seek our train, but it was a pleasant bit of the day. I envied our hostess her house as much as I did anyone in England. From one side of it she looked down upon the harbour – the Britannia and the Naval College and the green shores; from the other she looked away to the river mouth – Kingswear Castle and the open sea. While immediately around her, and adown her steep garden, she had all the privacy of Sandringham before the avenue was blown down.

Another "day out" enriched my collection of impressions of Devonshire with a set of charming memories. It was the day we went to the wedding.

"Now," said M., when she had explained to me that I was a potential guest, "I am going to show you, one of the finest views in England." Thereupon she described the situation of the country house which was to be the scene of festivity. It stood very high, in beautiful gardens, which dropped down and down in a succession of terraces, ending in a deep coombe and the sea. It was quite a famous beauty spot, apparently, and when I had seen it I should have seen Devonshire at its best. I did not need to be told what that meant.

At daybreak the fog was very thick and so remained till noon. We dressed before luncheon, having a long drive before us, and the fate of feathers and furbelows still hung doubtful. The carriage came round closed, and we slipped into wraps and set forth – my two sister-hostesses and myself – and there was no sign of the weather clearing. We were all fresh-air persons who could not stand being cooped up, and we opened the carriage windows, and the fog visibly flowed in. To me it was an agreeable circumstance – more so, for once, than the brilliant sunshine to which I was almost too well accustomed. It did not rain, nor feel like it; in fact there was not a drop all day, and we could see our way before us, and on both sides as far as the hedges of the deep-sunk, narrow lane-like roads. Those rich autumnal hedges tapestried the impalpable wall behind them with lovely forms that were a joy to study – wreathing ivy, intertwined with pink valerian, cascades of traveller's joy like the foam of our wild clematis at home. What the views beyond must have been I could guess, for we were driving for an hour or more and it seemed to be stiff climbing all the way.

We arrived at the decorated village – a village for a picture-book, if ever there was one. The road where the carriages of the assembling wedding guests were left had the effect of a ravine in its relation to the church above it. We looked up and before us rose an irregular footpath, like a worn-away and dislocated staircase, curving round and about the beflagged and beflowered churchyard hill; and its whole length, which straightened out would have been considerable, was covered with red baize which had evidently taken a good deal of fitting to make it lie so that it would not trip up the bridal company. At the top we could just see the outline of the church and the dim colour and flutter of the most distant flags. Sunshine could not have created a more charming effect.

The church is the crowning glory of that typical Devonshire village. It dates from the fourteenth century and its registers go back to the year 1538, but old age is not all its claim to distinction. It has a precious cradle roof inside and a not less precious rood-screen (time of Richard the Second), and a lovely harmony of every stick and stone with every other, that was a luxury to contemplate what time I sat among the wedding guests awaiting the coming of the bride. To-day the slender shafts of the screen had bridal flowers tied to them and nestling beneath – pink predominating (Japanese lilies, I think), a colour which "went" with the blackened oak as cold white blossoms would not have done. I had but such glimpses of the chancel as the interstices of the screen afforded; understanding that the chancel was a "restoration" I was content with that. I heard afterwards that it had a "squint" and rood-stairs, fourteenth-century brasses and other interesting things, such as I made a reverent study of in my young days.

The bride arrived. She was a young Norwegian lady, and a bright-faced, wholesome, happy-looking creature – as attractive a bride as one could wish to wait on. The English bridegroom looked a good fellow, and I trust he has made her a good husband.

They stood outside the screen and close to us for the first part of the marriage service, which the officiating clergyman declaimed with remarkable enthusiasm; then they passed into the sanctuary for the completion of the rite. As a mere wedding it was like other weddings. The coloured flowers in the decorations (I believe they were all white in the chancel) was the only unusual note.

But when the bride and bridegroom came out of church man and wife together, there were a couple of minutes when the bridal spectacle surpassed anything of the sort that I ever saw. I want to paint the scene, but I know I cannot do it – cannot convey to another who was not there the impression it made on me. The subject may be "genre," but of all the pictures in my gallery I can find none more poetically composed. Let me try to sketch it somehow.

You must first imagine rural Devonshire and one of its sweetest villages; the deep road, the hedges and the trees and the churchyard slopes, the flowers, the flags, the scarlet carpet, the still rainless mist. The red stairway twisting and dropping through the green from porch to gate is now lined with the village children, all in bewreathed new hats (provided by the bride's family), and they hold in their hands baskets of flower petals, with which they bestrew the way of the bridal procession. Down they come – we had preceded them to the road, or I should have lost one of the sights of my life – down they come, winding with the winding path, the bride with her veil up, smiling and bowing, her white train and her young maids behind her; every figure, every feature of the scene, refined and idealised by the (to me) extraordinary atmosphere. Bright sunlight would have made a picture which I should have thought perfect had I not seen it through this pure poetic haze. As a study of fog effects – well, it is no use trying to elucidate the thing further. But I carried it away with the delight of a collector in a work of art that is unmatchable, and now it is safe in my gallery of Blessed Memories, and I would not take any money for it.

When we drove to the house which commanded "one of the finest views in England" – home of the bride's sister – a rather less density of fog would have answered the purpose, instead of which we had rather more. The house, with its platform and all the lawns and flower-beds and marquees thereon, was quite plain to view; the first terrace was visible; some trees between that and the second tier of garden loomed a shade more substantial than their shadows would have been; below and beyond them – nothing. Nothing, nothing but cotton-wool, a white blanket, a wall impenetrable. Not a glimpse, not a hint of the coombe and sea that M. had promised me. So that to this day I do not really know how lovely Devonshire can be, although I can imagine that I know.