Well, as I was saying, he slipped down between two rocks and sprained his ankle. He didn’t, like those (I fear) apocryphal artists in the stories, lie there gracefully and quote Shakespeare and Dr. Watts about it, until two lovely heiresses to untold millions came along in a boat and rescued him from the rising tide, and fell in love with him and married the fellow (one of them, I mean; the other—in the stories—dies of a broken heart).
No! He lay there and swore dreadfully, until some fishermen came along and refused to take him off in their boat until he had paid them a sov., money down, when he swore (if possible) more dreadfully than before. No beautiful girls came and rescued him at all; only one old maid passed, who, thinking he was drunk, gave him a tract, warned him against the evils of intemperance, and went away, shocked at the “language” he used.
This is a very sad and unromantic episode, I know, but things do fall out thus in real life. If this simple story should prove of any use to realistic novelists, I’m sure I should be only too proud for them to use it.
Meanwhile, let us away to Torquay. Here a steep and rugged path, leading up the face of the cliff, brings us to Labrador. Every visitor to Teignmouth goes also to Labrador, a name not usually coupled with sunshine and sparkling sea, al fresco teas, and roses at a penny a piece. He was a romantic mercantile Jack, who, retiring from the Newfoundland and North American seas, laid out his precarious little estate and built this little house on it, and named his domain after an inhospitable coast. He has voyaged long since into the Unknown, and his romance has gone with him, for the place is now but a superior sort of tea-garden, where you drink your tea and eat your cream and strawberries in the open-air arbours and the society of innumerable centipedes and spiders.
You cannot fare farther along the coast-line, just here, without becoming bedevilled amid fallen rocks and rising tides; and to climb the cliffs at a venture might haply result in being hung up on some impracticable ledge, whence advance or retreat would be alike impossible. So we climbed the usual, though precipitous, path past Labrador on to the cliff-top, and from thence across ruddy fields to the dusty highway, along which, to our surprise, came two Italians with a piano-organ. O Herrick!
The minstrels from the town are gone—
On Devon roads you’ll find ’em;
They play “Ta-ra,” “He’s Got ’em On”
(Those cursed tunes), and grind ’em,
Both day and night, in curly chords,
On organs called “piano;”
They hail, these handle-turning hordes,
From Tiber, or the Arno.
To “Get Your Hair Cut” they incite,
In thrilling shakes and catches,
With notes that thunder day and night;
They grind ’em forth in batches.
“’Ow you’d like ’Awkins for your other name,”
They play “expressione”—
Away! you errant sons of song,
To home, and—macaroni.
“Piano” do they call the things?
I wish they were so, really.
“Fortissimo,” their torture rings—
I’d like to smash ’em, dearly.
Tommaso from Bologna hails;
Paolo from Napoli;
Their organ, with its trills and wails,
Proceeds from place unholy.
“Would the signori lika ze musique?” and, suiting the action to the word, the chief brigand gave the organ-handle a turn. Out leaped the initial bars of—yes, let it be named—“Ta-ra-ra Boom de Ay.” The signori would not like any; please to go away. “What,” asked the Wreck, “is the Italian for ‘take your hook?’” But I didn’t know, and so, in default, to cut matters short, we took ours.
There was no escaping the ubiquitous tune that was our “only wear” in matters musical last year. The very trains that rattled one down to the sounding sea pounded it out to the alert ear as they ran along the metals; the fly-man, who drove you at a crawling pace to your “digs.,” whistled it; and your landlady’s daughter (“a dear good girl, sir, an’ clever at ’er music, which she takes after me in, though I ses it as shouldn’t. Play the gentleman something, there’s a love”) thumped it out unmercifully. Seaside landladies, by the way, have always, by some strange dispensation of Providence, three things apparently inseparable from their race—a daughter, a piano, and a sea-view. The daughter plays on the piano, and the landlady harps upon the view—both musical, you see. Most, also, have “seen better days,” and as it usually rains when I visit those yellow sands, the statement admits of no dispute.