Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  Before our train went, we had time to go a longish walk, which we took through some pleasant, rather new, streets of small houses, each with its gardened front-yard hedged about it with holly or laurel, and looking a good, dull, peaceful home. It may really have been neither, and life may have been as wild, and bad, and fascinating in those streets as in the streets of any American town of the same population as Bradford. There was everything in the charming old place to make life easy; good shops of all kinds, abundant provisions, stores, and not too many licensed victuallers, mostly women, privileged to sell wine and spirits. Yet, as the twilight began to fall, Bradford seemed very lonely, and we thought with terror, what if we should miss our train back to Bath! We got to the station, however, in time to cower half an hour over a grate in which the Company had munificently had a fire early in the day; and to correct by closer observation of an elderly pair an error which had flattered our national pride at the time of our arrival. In hurrying away to get the only fly at the station the lady had then fallen down and the gentleman had kept on, leaving her to pick herself up as she could, while he secured the fly. Perhaps he had not noticed her falling, but we chose to think the incident very characteristically middle-class English; for all we knew it might be a betrayal of the way all the English treated their wives. Now the same couple arrived to take the train with us for Bath, and we heard them censuring its retard in accents unmistakably American! We fell from our superiority to our English half-brothers instantly; and I think the little experience was useful in confirming me in the resolution throughout my English travels to practise that slowness in sentencing and executing offenders against one’s native ideals and standards which has always been the conspicuous ornament of English travellers among ourselves.

  The day that we drove out from Bath to a certain charming old house which I wish I could impart my sense of, but which I will at once own the object of a fond despair, was apparently warm and bright, but was really dim and cold. That is, the warmth and brightness were superficial, while the cold and dimness were structural. The fields on either side of the road were mostly level, though here and there they dipped or rose, delicately green in their diaphanous garment of winter wheat, or more substantially clad in the grass which the winter’s cold had not been great enough to embrown. Here and there were spaces of woodland, withdrawn rather afar from our course, except where the trees of an avenue led up from the highway to some unseen mansion. To complete the impression you must always, under the tender blue sky, thickly archipelagoed with whity-brown clouds, have rooks sailing and dreamily scolding, except where they wake into a loud clamor among the leafless tops surrounding some infrequent roof. There are flights of starlings suddenly winging from the pastures, where the cows with their untidily caked and clotted hides are grazing, and the sheep are idling over the chopped turnips, and the young lambs are shivering with plaintive cries. Amid their lamentations the singing of birds makes itself heard; the singing of larks, or the singing of robins, Heaven knows which, but always angelically sweet. The bare hedges cross and recross the fields, and follow the hard, smooth road in lines unbroken save near some village of gray walls and red roofs, topped by an ancient church. In the background, over a stretch of embankment or along the side of a low hill, sweeps a swift train of little English cars, with a soft whirring sound, as unlike the giant roar of one of our expresses as it is unlike the harsh clatter of a French rapide. The white plumes of steam stretch after it in vain; break, and float thinner and thinner over the track behind.

  There were, except in the villages, very few houses; and we met even fewer vehicles. There was one family carriage, with the family in it, and a sort of tranter’s wagon somewhere out of Hardy’s enchanted pages, with a friendly company of neighbors going to Bath inside it. At one exciting moment there was a lady in a Bath chair driving a donkey violently along the side of the road. A man slashing and wattling the lines of hedge, or trimming the turf beside the foot-path, left his place in literature, and came to life as the hedger and ditcher we had always read of. Beneath the hedges here and there very “rathe primroses” peered out intrepidly, like venturesome live things poising between further advance and retreat. The road was admirable, but it seemed strange that so few people used it. The order in which it was kept was certainly worthy of constant travel, and we noted that from point to point there was a walled space beside it for the storage of road-mending material. At home we should dump the broken stone in the gutter near the place that needed mending, or on the face of the highway, but in England, where everything is so static, and the unhurried dynamic activities are from everlasting to everlasting, a place is specially provided for broken stone, and the broken stone is kept there.

  The drive from Bath to our destination was twelve miles, and the friend who was to be our host for the day had come as far on his wheel to ask us. It was the first of many surprises in the continued use of the bicycle which were destined to confound strangers from a land whose entire population seemed to go bicycle-mad a few years ago, and where now they are so wholly recovered that the wheel is almost as obsolete as the russet shoe. As both the wheel and the russet shoe are excellent things in their way, though no American could now wear the one or use the other without something like social suicide, the English continue to employ them with great comfort and entire self-respect. They fail so wholly to understand why either should have gone out with us that one becomes rather ashamed to explain that it was for the same reason that they came in, merely because everybody had them.

  Our friend had given us explicit directions for our journey, and it was well that he did so, for we had two turnings to take on that lonely road, and there were few passers whom we could ask our way. We really made the driver ask it, and he did not like to do it, for he felt, as we did, that he ought to know it. I am afraid he was not a very active intelligence, and I doubt if he had ever before been required to say what so many birds and flowers were. I think he named most of them at random, and when it came at last to a very common white flower, he boldly said that he had forgotten what it was. As we drew near the end of our journey he grew more anxiously complicated in such knowledge of our destination as he acquired. But he triumphed finally in the successive parleys held to determine the site of a house which had been in its place seven or eight hundred years, and might, in that time have ceased to be a matter of doubt even among the farther neighbors. It was with pride on his part and pleasure on ours that suddenly and most unexpectedly, when within a few yards of it, he divined the true way, and drove into the court-yard of what had at times been the dower-house, where we were to find our host and guide to the greater mansion.

  As this house is a type of many old dower-houses I will be so intimate as to say that you enter it from the level of the ground outside, such a thing as under-pinning to lift the floor from the earth and to make an airspace below being still vaguely known in England, and in former times apparently unheard of. But when once within you are aware of a charm which keeps such houses inviolate in the form of the past; and this one was warmed for us by a hospitality which refined itself down to the detail of a black cat basking before the grate: a black cat that promptly demanded milk after our luncheon, but politely waited to be asked to the saucer when it was brought. From the long room which looked so much a study that I will not call it differently, the windows opened on the shrubberies and lawns and gardens that surround such houses in fiction, and keep them so visionary to the corner who has known them nowhere else that it would be easy to transgress the bounds a guest must set himself, and speak as freely of the people he met there as if they were persons in a pleasant book. Two of them, kindred of the manor-house and of the great house near, had come from three or four miles away on their wheels. Our host himself, the youngest son of the great house, was a painter, by passion as well as by profession, and a reviewer of books on art, such as plentifully bestrewed his table and forbade us to think of the place in the ordinary terms as a drawing-room. It seemed to me charac
teristic of the convenient insular distances that here, far in the West, almost on the Welsh border, he should be doing this work for a great London periodical, in as direct touch with the metropolis as if he dwelt hard by the Park, and could walk in fifteen minutes to any latest exhibition of pictures.

  When he took us after luncheon almost as long a walk to his studio, I fancied that I was feeling England under my feet as I had not before. We passed through a gray hamlet of ten or a dozen stone cottages, where, behind or above their dooryard hedges, they had gradually in the long ages clustered near the great house, and a little cottage girl, who was like a verse of Wordsworth, met us, and bidding us good-day, surprised us by dropping a courtesy. It surprised even our friends, who spoke of it as if it were almost the last courtesy dropped in England, and made me wish I could pick it up, and put it in my note-book, to grace some such poor page as this: so pretty was it, so shy, so dear, with such a dip of the suddenly weakening little knees.

  We were then on our way to see first the small gray church which had been in its place among the ancient graves from some such hoary eld as English churches dream of in like places all over the land, and make our very faith seem so recent a thing. It was in a manner the family chapel, but it was also the spiritual home of the lowlier lives of village and farm, and was shared with them in the reciprocal kindness common in that English world of enduring ties. There for ages the parish folk had all been christened, and all married, and all buried, and there in due time they had been or would be forgotten. The edifice was kept in fit repair by the joint piety of rich and poor, with the lion’s share of the expense rightfully falling to the rich, as in such cases it always does in England; and within and without the church the affection of the central family had made itself felt and seen, since the Christian symbols were first rudely graven in the stone of the square church-tower.

  The name of the family always dwelling in that stately old house whither we were next going had not always been the same, but its nature and its spirit had been the same. An enlightened race would naturally favor the humane side in all times, and the family were Parliamentarian at the time England shook off the Stuart tyranny, and revolutionist when she finally ridded herself of her faithless Jameses and Charleses. In the archives of the house there are records of the hopes vainly cherished by a son of it who was then in New York, that our own revolt against the Georgian oppression might be composed to some peaceful solution of the quarrel. It was not his fault that this hope was from the first moment too late, but it must be one of his virtues in American eyes that he saw from the beginning the hopelessness of any accommodation without a full concession of the principles for which the colonies contended. In the negotiation of the treaty at Versailles in 1783 he loyally did his utmost for his country against ours at every point of issue, and especially where the exiled American royalists were concerned. Our own commissioners feared while they respected him, and John Adams wrote of him in his diary, “He pushes and presses every point as far as it can possibly go; he has a most eager, earnest, pointed spirit.”

  This was the first baronet of his line, but the real dignity and honor of the house has been that of a race of scholars and thinkers. Their public spirit has been of the rarer sort which would find itself most at home in the literary association of the place, and it has come to literary expression in a book of singular charm. In the gentle wisdom of sympathies which can be universal without transcending English conditions, the Talk at a Country House, as the book modestly calls itself, strays to topics of poetry, and politics, and economics, and religion, yet keeps its allegiance to the old house we were about to see as a central motif. It was our first English country house, but I do not think that its claim on our interest was exaggerated by its novelty, and I would willingly chance finding its charm as potent again, if I might take my way to it as before. We came from the old church now by the high-road, now through fringes of woodland, and now over shoulders of pasturage, where the lesser celandine delicately bloomed, and the primrose started from the grass, till at last we emerged from under the sheltering boughs of the tall elms that screened the house from our approach. There was a brook that fell noisily over our way, and that we crossed on a rustic bridge, and there must have been a drive to the house, but I suppose we did not follow it. Our day of March had grown gray as it had grown old, and we had not the light of a day in June, such as favored an imaginary visitor in Talk at a Country House, but we saw the place quite so much as he did that his words will be better than any of my own in picturing it.

  “The air was resonant with rooks as they filled the sky with the circles in which they wheeled to and fro, CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS disappearing in the distance to appear again, and so gradually reach their roosting trees.... I might call them a coruscation of rooks.... On my left I saw... the old battlemented wall, and a succession of gables on either side... and one marked by a cross which I knew must be the chapel.... The old, battlemented wall had a flora of its own: ferns, crimson valerian, snap-dragons, and brier-roses... and an ash and a yew growing on the battlements where they had been sown no doubt by the rooks. And as I passed through an archway of the road, the whole house came in view. It was not a castle nor a palace, but it might be called a real though small record of what men had been doing there from the time of the Doomsday Book to our own.”

  As we grew more acquainted with it, we realized that at the front it was a building low for its length, rising gray on terraces that dropped from its level in green, green turf. Some of the long windows opened down to the grass, with which the ground floor was even. Above rose the Elizabethan, earlier Tudor, and Plantagenet of the main building, the wings, and the tower of the keep. The rear of the house was enclosed by a wall of Edward II.’s time, and beyond this was a wood of elms, tufted with the nests of that eternal chorus of coruscating rooks. At first we noticed their multitudinous voices, but in a little while they lost all severalty of sound, like waves breaking on the shore, and I fancied one being so lulled by them that one would miss them when out of hearing, and the sense would ache for them in the less soothing silence.

  The family was away from home, and there were no reserves in the house, left in the charge of the gardener, as there must have been if it were occupied. But I do not hope to reproduce my impressions of it. I can only say that a sense of intellectual refinement and of liberal thought was what qualified for me such state as characterized the place. The whole structure within as well as without was a record of successive temperaments as well as successive times. Each occupant had built up or pulled down after his fancy, but the changes had left a certain physiognomy unchanged, as the mixture of different strains in the blood still leaves a family look pure. The house, for all its stateliness, was not too proud for domesticity; its grandeur was never so vast that the home circle would be lost in it. The portraits on the walls were sometimes those of people enlarged to history in their lives, but these seemed to keep with the rest their allegiance to a common life. The great Bess of Hardwicke, the “building Bess,” whose architectural impulses effected themselves in so many parts of England, had married into the line and then married out of it (to become, as Countess of Shrewsbury, one of the last jailers of Mary Queen of Scots), and she had left her touch as well as her face on its walls, but she is not a more strenuous memory in it than a certain unstoried dowager. She, when her son died, took half the house and left half to her daughter-in-law, whom she built off from herself by a partition carried straight through the mansion to the garden wall, with a separate gate for each.

  In her portrait she looks all this and more; and a whole pathetic romance lives in the looks of that lady of the first Charles’s time who wears a ring pendent from her neck, and a true-lovers’ knot embroidered on the bodice over her heart, and who died unwedded. There were other legends enough; and where the pictures asserted nothing but lineage they were still very interesting. They were of people who had a life in common with the house, wives and mothers and daughters, sons
and husbands and fathers, married into it or born into it, and all receiving from it as much as they imparted to it, as if they were of one substance with it and it shared their consciousness that it was the home of their race. We have no like terms in America, and our generations, which are each separately housed, can only guess at the feeling for the place of their succession which the generations of such an English house must feel. It would be easy to overestimate the feeling, but in view of it I began to understand the somewhat defiant tenderness with which the children of such a house must cherish the system which keeps it inalienably their common home, though only the first-born son may dwell in it. If there were no law to transmit it to the eldest brother they might well in their passion for it be a law unto themselves at any sacrifice and put it in his hands to have and hold for them all.