As time goes on, he finds Arcadian poverty of circumstance gradually becoming unbearable. He misses the familiar conveniences and orderly arrangements of his London life. He has a raging tooth, and there is no dentist for miles round; he falls sick, or sprains his ankle, and the only doctor at hand is a half tipsy vet., or perhaps an old woman skilled in herbs, or a bone-setter with a local reputation. His letters go astray among the various hands to which they are entrusted; his paper is irregular; Punch and his illustrated weeklies come a day late, with torn covers and greasy thumbmarks testifying to the love of pictorial art which encountered them by the way. He finds that he wants the excitement of professional life and the changeful action of current history. He feels shunted here, out of the world, in a corner, set aside, lost. The rest is still delicious; but he misses the centralized interest of metropolitan life, and catches himself hankering after the old intellectual fleshpots with the fervour of an exile, counting the days of his further stay.
And then at last this rest, which has been so sweet, becomes monotony, and palls on him. One trout is very like another trout, barring a few ounces of weight. When he has expatiated on his first find of moon-fern, and dug it up carefully by the roots for his own fernery at Bayswater, he is slightly disgusted to come upon many tufts of moon-fern, and to know that it is not so very rare hereabouts after all, and that he cannot take away half he sees. Then too, he begins to understand the true meaning of the pictures, Gainsborough and others, which were so quaintly beautiful to him in the early days. The idyllic youths dancing in the beerhouse barn are clumsy louts who are kept from the commission of great offences mainly because they have no opportunity for dramatic sins; but they indemnify themselves by petty agricultural pilferings, and they get boozy on small beer. The pretty market-girls cantering by, are much like other daughters of Eve elsewhere, save that they have more familiarity with certain facts of natural life than good girls in town possess, and are a trifle more easy to dupe. On the whole, he finds human nature much the same in essentials here as in London—Arcadia being the poorer of the two, inasmuch as it wants the sharpness, the deftness, the refinement of bearing given by much intercourse and the more intimate contact of classes.
By the time his holidays are over, our London man goes back to his work invigorated in body, but quite sufficiently sated in mind to return with pleasure to his old pursuits. He walks into the office decidedly stouter than when he left, much sunburnt, and unfeignedly glad to see them all again. It pleases him to feel like MacGregor on his native heath once more; though his native heath is only a dingy office in the E.C. district, with a view of his rival's chimney-pots. Still it is pleasant; and to know that he is recognized as Mr. So-and-So of the City, a safe man and with a character to lose, is more gratifying to his pride than to have his quality and standing discussed in village back-parlours and tap-rooms, and the question whether he is a man whom Arcadia may trust, gravely debated by boors whose pence are not as his pounds. He speaks with rapture of his delightful holiday, and extols the virtues of Arcadia and the Arcadians as warmly as if he believed in them. Perhaps he grumbles ostentatiously at his return to harness; but in his heart he knows it to be the better life; for, delicious as it is to sit in the sun eating lotuses, it is nobler to weed out tares and to plant corn.
The peace to which we are all looking is not to be had in a Highland glen nor a Devonshire lane; and beautiful as are the retreats and show-places to which men of business rush for rest and refreshment—peaceful as they are to look at, and happy as it seems to us their inhabitants must be—it is all only a matter of the eye. They are Arcadias, if one likes to call them so; but while a man's powers remain to him they are halting-places only, not homes; and he who would make them his home before his legitimate time, would come to a weariness which should cause him to regret bitterly and often the collar which had once so galled him, and the work at the hardness of which he had so often growled.
STRANGERS AT CHURCH.
If nothing is sacred to a sapper, neither is anything sacred to temper, ostentation, vanity; and church as little as any place else. In those thronged show-places which have what is called a summer season, church is the great Sunday entertainment; and when the service is of an ornate kind, and the strangers' seats are chairs placed at the west end, where in old times the village choir or the village schoolboys used to be, a great deal of human life goes on among the occupants; and there are certain displays of temper and feeling which make you ask yourself whether these strangers think it a religious service, or an operatic, at which they have come to assist, and whether what you see about you is quite in consonance with the spirit of the place or not. If the church is one that presents scenic attractions in the manner in which the service is conducted, there is a run on the front middle seats, as if the ceremonies to be performed were so much legerdemain or theatrical spectacle, of which you must have a good view if you are to have your money's worth; and the more knowing of the strangers take care to be early in the field, and to establish themselves comfortably before the laggards come up. And when the best places are all filled, and the laggards do come up, then the human comedy begins.
Here trip in a couple of giggling girls, greatly conscious of their youth and good looks, but still more conscious of their bonnets. They look with tittering dismay at the crowded seats all along the middle, and when the verger makes them understand that they must go to the back of the side aisle, where they can be seen by no one but will only be able to hear the service and say their prayers, they hesitate and whisper to each other before they finally go up, feeling that the great object for which they came to church has failed them, and they had better have stayed away and taken their chance on the parade. When they speak of it afterwards, they say it was 'awfully slow sitting there;' and they determine to be earlier another time.
There sweep in a triad of superbly dressed women with fans and scent-bottles, who disdainfully decline the back places which the same verger, with a fine sense of justice and beginning to fail a little in temper, inexorably assigns them. They too confer together, but by no means in whispers; and finally elect to stand in the middle aisle, trusting to their magnificence and quiet determination to get 'nice places' in the pewed sittings. They are fine ladies who look as if they were performing an act of condescension by coming at all without special privileges and separation from the vulgar; as if they had an inherent right to worship God in a superior and aristocratic manner, and were not to be confounded with the rest of the miserable sinners who ask for mercy and forgiveness. They are accustomed to the front seats everywhere; so why not in the place where they say sweetly they are 'nothing of themselves,' and pray to be delivered 'from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy'? That old lady, rouged and dyed and dressed to represent the heyday of youth, who also is supposed to come to church to say her prayers and confess her sins, looks as if she would be more at home at the green tables at Homburg than in an unpretending chair of the strangers' quarter in the parish church. But she finds her places in her Prayer-book, if after a time and with much seeking; and when she nods during the sermon, she has the good-breeding not to snore. She too, has the odd trick of looking like condescension when she comes in, trailing her costly silks and laces behind her; and by her manner she leaves on you the impression that she was a beauty in her youth; has been always used to the deference and admiration of men; to servants and a carriage and purple and fine linen; that all of you, whom she has the pleasure of surveying through her double eyeglass, are nobodies in comparison with her august self; and that she is out of place among you. She makes her demonstration, like the rest, when she finds that the best seats are already filled and that no one offers to stir that she may be well placed; and if she is ruthlessly relegated to the back, and stays there, as she does sometimes, your devotions are rendered uncomfortable by the unmistakable protest conveyed in her own. Only a few humble Christians in fashionable attire take those back places contentedly, and find they can say their prayers and sing their hymns with spiritual comfort to themselves, whether they are shut out from a sight of the decorations on the altar and the copes and stoles of the officiating ministers, or are in full view of the same. But then humble Christians in fashionable attire are rare; and the old difficulty about the camel and the needle's eye, remains.