The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

I have been looking over a batch of new magazines, and the heading of a paper in one of them gives a sentence borrowed from a letter of Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Dean Howells, which I will borrow again for an opening to this chapter: "I've a theory that every author while living has a projection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near and distant places and makes friends and enemies for him out of folk who never knew him in the flesh. When the author dies this phantom fades away ... then the dead writer lives only in the impression made by his literature." Having written this down and looked at it, I feel that it is not so profound a saying as I thought. The first proposition is as obvious as can be; your eidolon is in the pages of your book, and the more directly you speak to your affinity the more quickly he responds (and he cannot respond effectively unless you are there to know it); the second seems to pass over the fact that when these spirit friendships materialise they become as other friendships, independent of literature or any outside thing. What I set out to show, by my quotation, was that the friends my eidolon had made for me in England outnumbered the friends of corporeal origin, and that some of them gave me my happiest English days. I flew to their arms as naturally and fearlessly as if I had lived with them in the flesh for as many years as we had otherwise known each other, and when I am dead I shall not be a dead author to them, but a dead woman. Alas! the phantom fades away in any event.

This I have found to be the prime joy of authorship—the knowledge that, when you are projecting yourself into your book, although nobody around you may know or care what you are talking about, you are still bound to reach some who will perfectly understand. You are speaking to your unknown kindred in the near and distant places; if you do not know it at the time—but you do know it—the proof comes later in the letters of some of them, who tell you they have been impelled to write. Precious recognition! And letters are so eloquent between the lines that you rarely make mistakes about them. They tell you that the wireless message has got "home" to where it belongs—or otherwise.

At the beginning of this century I published a volume of personal reminiscences, entitled "Thirty Years in Australia." Coincident with the conversion of the colony of Victoria into a state of the new Commonwealth, the thirtieth year of my sojourn within her borders was completed in 1900, and it seemed a good time to say something of what in our young country we call the "old days," the "good old times," the old pioneer colonial life of which the records are so few at home and the ignorance abroad so vast. Although, when I come to think of it, I believe it was merely as a rest from novel-writing that I started upon the work. I gossiped through the casual chapters—drivelled, some may say, much as I am doing now—with no idea that the completed book would be other than a trifling by-product (my London agent agreeing with this view), of little interest to readers outside Australia. But behold! Of the score or more of "works" to which I must plead guilty, this one has brought me more happiness than all the others put together, on each of which the profit in love has been more considerable than the profit in money. Old friends of the seventies, long passed from sight and knowledge although not from mind, recognised themselves in the guarded initials of their names, and they or their widowed partners or their children wrote to tell me where they were, to recall past companionships, to urgently beg and hospitably plan for a renewal of them. And thus came delightful reunions, mendings of gaps, comparing of experiences, comradeships for old age such as can never be for those who have not spent some of their youth together.

But far beyond the number of these were the friends not made by accident but by the design of Nature, although the accident of the book discovered them—friends altogether unknown until it found them for me in the near and distant places—also to be lost no more.

Away in Ireland lived a retired colonel of Hussars, who one day took it from the shelves of his local library. He did not fancy the title—Australia was not a name to conjure with in the British Isles, British though she was—but, after turning a few leaves, he thought it might serve for an idle hour. He read it aloud to his wife after dinner, and when he had finished it he wrote to me. It was the beginning of a correspondence which, by the time I started for England, gave me the hope of seeing them as one of the joys before me. And when I arrived their welcoming letter was amongst the first batch to come on board, and notified that he was himself in London, "at my service." As was the case in every situation of this kind, sanguine anticipations were fulfilled, and something left over. Never once was I disappointed in a spirit friend made flesh. I met him first at luncheon in the house of the beloved friend who had set herself to give me the time of my life, and he helped her to do it. I shall not forget the Ascot week of 1908. Certainly I have not much time to remember it in, but if I had a hundred years it would be the same. After we had "done" London—the restaurant dinners and the plays, the pictures, the flip-flap and the Sports' Club at the Franco-British Exhibition, little gaieties of a world I had not known but took to like a duck to water—he planned out my route to Ireland. That would have been the crown of all, but time and money would not stretch to it. Never mind. I still expect to go there some day.

Then away in Boston—Boston in Massachusetts—there lives another dear friend, discovered just as he was. For years we have corresponded intimately, and every line that I write for the press I can regard as a letter to her. She would come to Australia to see me, if she could; the possibility of such an enterprise on the part of a much-engaged wife and mother has been considered; but her promise to meet me in England, should I ever be there, was absolute. One does not allow for the "visitation of God" in making one's engagements, and it was only that which abrogated this one. I heard from her that she had been ready to start, not for London but for my ship at the docks, to be the first to receive me, bringing over a motor for my English use; and illness in her family had stopped her. She begged me to wait for the following spring, but I could not; and so we have not materialised each other yet. If we never do so, we shall love each other to the end. But we are hoping still.

And there were other friends of the eidolon in England and inaccessible, whose letters of welcome awaited me at Gravesend. One of them lived, as she still lives, at that watering-place on the Norfolk coast where I spent happy summers with my family when a child. That is to say, she lives in the new watering-place (not in existence then) which is an offshoot of the one I knew, still an old village, which its modern neighbour was from the first forbidden to touch. The lord of the manor comprising both—he who kept drinking houses and dissenting chapels off his land for so long—had a sense of the fitness of things so fine that it was almost a fad. When he allowed the new watering-place on the cliff where but one solitary house—an inn—had stood in my time, he laid the plan of the town himself and permitted only a beautiful brown stone of the locality to be used for the houses. Now vulgar bricks and jerry-building are creeping in, because his son, the present squire, cannot help it; but the good taste of the founder can stand up against them for a long time to come. It was never the typical fashionable watering-place, and, thanks to him, never can be until his work is swept away.

It is a great place, however, to have grown up in the interval since I walked to it from old H——, with my governess, to inquire at the "New Inn" (old then, and a beautiful house now) whether by chance they had such a things as "Revalenta Arabica," which a doctor or somebody had recommended for our dying baby, and for which we had ransacked the village in vain. I think that was my last sight of "The Green" that now is, which the local guide-book describes as "a standing reminder of the artistic mind that conceived and executed the formation of H——." To the people of this part, they are H—— now, and the ancient village a mile away is Old H——; more often it is insultingly referred to as the Old End; to me the village is H——, and this New H——. Of course this H—— monopolises all the luxuries of civilisation; not only the old "New Inn" (with a new name and enlarged and important), on one side of the Green, but a huge G.E.R. Hotel, with the railway station under it, on the other; a great Town Hall, a grand pier with pavilion at the end of it, a fine stone-balustraded "Sea Walk" above the beach, public gardens, public tennis-courts; a splendid church, with its independent vicar and curate, and (which should surely make the late squire turn in his grave) a Wesleyan Chapel and a "Union" Chapel, the latter evidently some other irregular denomination, since I do not think New H—— has a workhouse yet; besides gas and telephones and all such things.

And so here lived my friend, where she could be quite comfortable. But in the days when she was not a widow, but wife of a rector of the neighbourhood—and before that, as a member of an old Norfolk family (she married into another)—she knew all about the H—— of my day; and when she chanced to read "Thirty Years in Australia," and penetrated my dark allusions to the locality and my unprinted thoughts about it, the kindly notion came into her head to tell me that my old H—— of cherished memory was still there, unchanged. With the divination of a spirit friend she knew just what it would mean to me to know that. Not only did she write to tell me, she sent me a bundle of photographs to prove her words. When I received them, I had no ghost of an idea that I should ever see H—— again with my bodily eyes, and they gushed tears over the little postcard scenes, so full of sad and sweet reminders of vanished hands and days that were no more. I kept them on a table by my Australian bedside, and used to strike matches in the middle of the night and light a candle to look at them once more, and again once more. Little did I foresee the day when I should buy them at their place of origin (fourpence a dozen) for myself!

Of course I wrote to thank her, although I could not find words to thank her adequately; it was the beginning of a correspondence signifying a lasting friendship.