By this time we were in Devonshire. We were actually waiting at Exeter—Exeter, of which I had heard so much, endeared by so many old associations—and I was too deeply engaged with my good tea and nice bread-and-butter to seriously and adequately realise the fact. Alas! when it comes to tea I am afraid I am a gross person.
But I did not see Exeter in 1870. It was dark night then. I do not know if we even passed that way. Later in the afternoon, when I came to the scenes on which that old, old May dawn rose so tragically, you might have offered me tea without my seeing it. I could see nothing but the Devonshire that was all I knew, and think of nothing but identifying as much of it as possible. Ivy Bridge, name as well as place, I had had the memory-print of for all the years, but it lay beyond my goal to-day. That other place, unknown, where the sea came up to the railway and the train ran through and under the red cliffs, I found was Dawlish. Sweet spot, so long beloved! I am told that the one blot on the beauty of Dawlish is the railway on its sea-front. This is from the resident's point of view. Let him remember what its position means sometimes to the passing railway traveller.
[CHAPTER XIV]
DEVON, GLORIOUS DEVON
Being in Devonshire I sat down on one of the most notoriously beautiful of all the beauty spots of the county. It was traditional that the old gentleman of the island who had had several homes, and the means to make them what he would, never had one in a place that was not beautiful. The island, as I knew, was beautiful, in its wild solitude of sea and sand and ti-tree scrub. Otherwise his family home in England was as great a contrast to the home in which he had chosen to spend his last years as could possibly be found. As I moved about the large rooms and up and down the stairs, every wall set thick with the valuable paintings he had gathered from abroad and from Christie's and from Royal Academy Exhibitions, it was odd indeed to think of the weather-board cottage and the few prints from illustrated papers tin-tacked to its pine lining, which he had deliberately preferred to them. The whole establishment, with all the dignities of fine family furniture, family crested silver, full staff of trained servants, and so on and so on—without one irregularity or eccentricity in its administration—represented the normal English gentleman's life, that of his kin and class, and by general use and wont his own. Yet, of his free choice, he left it all to go and live like Robinson Crusoe in an island hut, with a rough, wood-chopping Friday, and a domestic equipment of Britannia metal and stone china that could not stir the envy of a tramp.
After all, one can understand it. An old Australian, at any rate, can understand it. In his young days he had been a pioneer squatter. What old man looks back on this experience otherwise than with the feeling that he has seen the Golden Age? Never one that I ever met and I have met many. One can realise how the memory of that time of liberty and sunshine swelled and swelled (in a man with the imagination to love pictures and a fair outlook from his windows) as the years of fettering old-world conventions and grey skies went by. The older he grew the brighter shone the lights of the past—as with you and me, dear reader—and the craving to return to the scenes of youth, which are the realms of romance to the aged, must have been in him what the craving to return to England was to me for so many, many years. He had heaps of money, along with a singular power to discriminate between its real and its apparent values. It enabled him to please himself when there remained no dependent family to consider, and he pleased himself by removing it as a burden upon a freeborn spirit, while retaining enough to purchase liberty for the rest of life. I forgot to mention that before he built his island cottage he bought a caravan and in that humblest of homes toured the Australian bush and coast at leisure until he found the spot to suit him in which to make camp permanently.
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.