III A LAND OF DELIGHT
Hotel life, which for some people has a curious fascination, is to me a hateful necessity of travel, and few indeed are the hotels which I have sampled in my journeyings about the world where I have been able to feel even moderately comfortable, much less at home from home. The comfort of the old English inn, so fondly dwelt upon by Dickens, is a thing of the past, and the huge caravanserais of England, America, or the Continent, are places which to me are a positive nightmare. The extortion on every hand, the absolute lack of plain, homely cooked food which one can make a meal of, the almost unbearable and entirely uncomfortable magnificence on every side combine to make hotel life to me, and many others like-minded, a thing to be dreaded. Therefore I feel to-day that I am among the favoured ones of mankind in that I have "struck" a hotel which is my ideal of what a hotel should be. The attendants are delightfully civil without a trace of servility, the food is not merely as good as any that I have ever eaten but it is plainly, carefully dressed, and not smothered with vile concoctions of sauce to disguise its natural savours (in most places this is done as a sort of compensation for the lack of savour in the fish, flesh, or fowl dealt with), there are six or seven different kinds of vegetables, beautifully fresh and homelike, and cooked as if they were worth attention, with luncheon and dinner, there is abundance of most delicious fruit, baths are free and available all day, and the inclusive rate is ten shillings per day or three guineas a week. Also there are no niggling paltry extras for attendance, even the matutinal cup of tea and newspaper at 7 a.m., and the cup of afternoon tea being supplied free. I begin to wonder first whether there was ever before a hotel like this as I sit in my spacious, airy room, and secondly how, in the name of common experience, can it pay? I feel it almost an obvious duty to my kind to mention the name of this paragon among hotels, but may not because of the inevitable misconstruction which would be put upon my doing so.
Now I promise that there shall be little or no further mention of hotels in what I have to say. The next morning I awoke and stepped out upon the wide verandah into an air that was as heady as wine and almost too chilly for a sleeping suit. A perfect day, the golden sun flooding the world with light, the purple background of hills lying in slumberous shadow, and that sweet breeze pouring in upon the awakening city from the shimmering bay, just visible in patches from this elevation. Can this be Australia? My recollections of all her coasts from Townsville to Adelaide are very vivid, but they all include baking heat, scorching winds laden with sand, never at any time such a morning as this. But I must not stay indoors; it seems a sin, unless compelled. So as soon as possible I emerge, to be astounded by every person I meet saying, "Very cold this morning, isn't it?" Cold! I gasp with amazement, for to me the climate seems as nearly perfection as climate can be on this side of Paradise. As a matter of actual fact the shade temperature is 52° at 8 a.m.
A stroll round the bright, cheerful, clean, magnificently paved streets brings me to the inevitable conclusion that such changes as have taken place in the last twenty-six years are hardly noticeable by me. The most prominent edifices in the city, the Town Hall and Post Office, were then erected, but beyond that I feel certain that the city's growth has been so slow that its beauty remains absolutely unimpaired. I hope the citizens will not feel aggrieved at my saying this, especially as I fail entirely to see how the tremendously rapid growth of a London suburb, for instance, which in twenty years will add to its area of buildings and population two cities of the size of Adelaide, makes for that which we all profess most earnestly to desire—the greatest good of the greatest number. There is on this first walk of mine alone, and on observation bent, an utter absence of those great variations between blatant wealth and squalid poverty which are so painfully apparent at home and in America. And there is a generally diffused air of comfort prevailing among the people and in their dwellings that is to me most especially delightful to see. Even the ramshackle two-horse trams which hump along the road seem to say almost defiantly, "We're proud of being evidences of the absence of hustle. Our people can have the electric trolley-cars whenever they want them, but there is really not the least little bit of need for hurry in the world." And anyhow, all the roads in the city are just perfect to ride on either in buggy or motor, on a bicycle or to walk on, so splendidly graded and beautifully kept is the asphalt of which they are composed. It is an object-lesson patent to the most casual eye of the character of the people, this wonderful care of the roads.
Of all the cities that I have ever seen Adelaide comes easily first in the perfect beauty of its situation and arrangement. Level it is certainly, yet not nearly so level as it appears from the hills, with a lavish width of roadway even in what would in other places be mean streets, and beyond all the magnificent belt of park-lands which environ it, set aside for the health and enjoyment of its citizens as long as it shall be a city by wise, far-seeing old Colonel Light, bitterly as he was reviled at the time for making such a selection of a site for the capital of the new Colony. But it is not until the visitor has been taken in hand by some hospitable citizen, and, seated in a motor-car, has been whirled away by winding roads through lovely scenery up the beautiful flanks of Mount Lofty, that he recognises what a wonderfully handsome and ideally situated city it is. And there is a quiet exultation about those same citizens as, mounting higher and higher, they again and again invite you to survey the panorama beneath you, that is most pleasant to witness. They do not brag, bid you—as they would if they were Yankees—burst into unstinted panegyric, but they wait confidently and quietly for the expression of your honest opinion. And I do not think they are ever disappointed.
Each suburb that is passed on the upward journey is well groomed, and, moreover—a characteristic feature of this favoured land—looks as if the inhabitants had come to stay. There is no "I'm but a stranger here" appearance about the snug houses and well-kept lots, while the fruit-trees suggest a veritable garden of the Lord. All the home fruits grow here in rich profusion side by side with oranges, lemons, and grapes, grapes, grapes, until you cease to wonder how it is that the Adelaide hawkers can afford to stand all day selling grapes that are simply perfection for size, flavour, and variety at a uniform rate of a penny a pound. But gladly as I always welcome the view of an orchard or a vineyard, I confess that my attention was always more quickly arrested by the fat, black level land in the valleys, whereon was growing in most lavish profusion all the vegetables that we love at home—peas and beans, onions and potatoes, parsnip and beet, side by side with luxuriant tomatoes, huge melons, and many other tasty agricultural products of sub-tropical countries. A gentle land, where frost is unknown, where temperate and sub-tropical fruits and vegetables grow side by side, and the only trouble is to find sufficient markets for the abounding crops garnered with the minimum of labour.
But what I think impresses all visitors to this favoured spot more than anything else are the vineyards, especially if he be conversant with Continental grape-growing districts. This strong, red soil, bearing evidences of abundance of iron on every hand, seems to be the natural home of the grape, and to be free, to an amazing degree, from those insect pests which have made the lot of the French and Italian vignerons such a weary one. Every variety of grape seems to flourish here in such wonderful luxuriance and fecundity, and withal in such healthfulness of foliage and fruit, that the eye wearies of admiring their prolific masses. Quite unintentionally it so happened that I was invited to go and visit one of the youngest of the vineyards and its "winery," as it is called, in company with two gentlemen, proprietor and editor of a great newspaper out here. And I must confess that I was amazed at everything I saw. The wagon-loads of tiny but rich-tasting, luscious grapes, coming in from the adjacent vineyards, where they were being picked by a merry troop of boys and girls, the ceaseless elevator upon whose revolving shelves a burly, silent man hurled huge fork-loads of grapes, the drum above, in which those same grapes were separated from their stalks and crushed at the same time, the juice flowing one way, the stalks another, and the crushed skins another. All the swift process was mightily interesting, especially as contrasted with the old crude methods of the Continent, with their maximum of dirt. I thought of Macaulay's
"This year the must shall foam
'Neath the white(?) feet of laughing girls,"
and felt that this method was infinitely preferable. Then down below to where the great square backs full of juice were bubbling and boiling in the throes of fermentation, and I elicited information about the hastening of that wonderful process by the addition of special cultures à la Pasteur, for your Australian wine-grower is nothing if not scientific. Here is a flood of claret, here one from the Sauvignon grape, here the Muscat, here port, but all busy, and none allowed to waste an unnecessary moment in the preliminary processes, however long they may have to lie and mature afterwards. And I was especially interested in seeing how the tint of the grape was reproduced in the wine, so that a very slight acquaintance and a keen eye for colour would be sufficient to name the particular grape from which any given back-full had been crushed.
There was an air of absolute purity, of precise cleanliness everywhere which was exceedingly pleasant to notice, but there was also a curious solemnity, a brooding over everything, that was most impressive. Even on the top floor, where the machinery was in evidence, it made only a subdued hum, all being driven by an English-made petrol engine which I was proudly informed had run for four or five years, ever since it was put in, without any attention beyond an occasional wipe and the necessary feeding with petrol, and had never once given the slightest trouble. But as we descended into the vast cellars, amid vats and tuns of maturing wine varying in their contents from 500 to 2,500 gallons, the silence became positively oppressive, and I found myself involuntarily speaking in a whisper, as if in some stately fane. Again, anything more unlike the wine-cellars of the Old World that I have seen could not possibly be imagined. There, cobwebs, mildew, fungi, and a damp, earthy smell as of the tomb; here, not a spot of dirt or speck of dust to be seen anywhere, as if scores of busy housemaids were all over the place every morning, which of course could not be the case.
There were very few men about. Labour is costly here, and consequently every labour-saving appliance that can be devised is employed. But I was glad to learn that all the bottles I saw being filled were of Australian, not Belgian or German, make; that these people had too much patriotism to let a home industry be filched from them by free importers who would buy nothing in return. And certainly these hocks and clarets and ports looked very beautiful in their neat bottles with attractive labels, especially when I remembered having watched the whole process as far as the human eye could follow it, that they were all absolutely the pure juice of the grape without any extraneous admixture whatever, although for that I will not claim any special virtue on the part of the vigneron, only pointing out that the pure article is cheaper to make than any adulterated one would be.
We then went into the still-house, where from the must, the crushed grape-skins, an absolutely pure brandy was being distilled, and I remember vividly the outcry at home because it was said to be impossible to get pure brandy. I am assured, and I have no difficulty in believing, that it does not pay the Australian wine-grower to sophisticate his brandy. That it is infinitely superior to any foreign brandy on the market at double its price I can also well believe, and as far as a novice's taste may decide it certainly is more palatable than any French brandy I have ever tasted at any price. Why, then, is it not in its rightful place at home? Brandy is not a drunkard's drink; it is largely medicinal, and it is essential that it should be pure. And I believe that if the people who now pay large sums for inferior foreign brandy would only try the pure product of the Australian grape they would never purchase any other. The wine is said to be too strong, too alcoholic, and I can easily believe that to be the case, but as far as the brandy goes, it can only be described as the best obtainable because absolutely pure. I came away from the vineyard with a feeling of great pleasure, on the one hand that I had been privileged to witness so beautiful a process, and of intense sadness on the other that these splendid natural products of our own loyal kin should still be in the struggling stage, should still have to fight for a bare existence against far inferior Continental wines with nothing to recommend them but the prestige of the name. Fortunately the Australians are loyal to their wines, and drink them themselves; if they did not I am afraid these lovely vineyards would have to revert to wilderness, which would be a crime against civilisation.