The road to Lyminge was longer than it was broad, though its measure was in keeping with an island where the roads cannot be of our continental width. It opened to a sky smaller than ours, but from which there fell a pleasant sunshine with bird-singing in it; and there was room enough on the borders of the lane for more wild flowers than often grow by our waysides. When the envious hedges suffered us a glimpse of them we saw gentle fields on either hand, and men at work in their furrows. From time to time we met bicyclers of both sexes, and from time to time people in dogcarts. Once we met a man with a farm-cart, who seemed willing, though dull, when we asked our way. “Turn to left just inside the windmill,” he directed us; and by keeping outside of the mill, on a height beyond, we got to Lyminge.
I am sorry to report of the pastry-shop there that we had with our tea the only rancid butter offered us in England, and that in a country where the bread is always heavy and damp, it was here a little heavier and damper than elsewhere. But we were at Lyminge not for the pastry-shop, but the church, and that did not disappoint us, even to the foundation of the Roman edifice which is kept partly exposed beside it. The actual church is very Norman, and it is of that chilly charm which all Norman churches are of when the English spring afternoon begins to wane. From the tower down through the dim air dangled long bell-ropes bound with red stuff where the ringers seized them, and we heard, or seem now to have heard, that there had lately been a bell-ringing contest among them which must have stirred Lyminge to its centre. The day of our visit was market-day, and there had been cattle sales which left traces of unwonted excitement in the quiet streets, and almost thronged the bleak little station with the frequenters of the fair. One of these was of a type which I imagine is alien to the elder country life. The young man who embodied it was so full of himself, and of his day’s affairs, for which he was appropriately costumed in high boots and riding-breeches, that he overflowed in confidences to the American stranger. He told what cattle he had bought and what sold, and he estimated his gains at a figure which I hope was not too handsome. In return he invited the experience of the stranger whom he brevetted a cattle-dealer of perhaps a more old-fashioned kind, but whose errand at Lyminge on market-day was doubtless the same as his own. It was mortifying not to be able to comply, but my thoughts were still busy with the somewhat ghostly personage whom we had found deciphering an inscription on a stone in the church-yard, and whose weirdness was heightened by an impediment in his speech. He was very kind in helping us out in our mild curiosity, and I hope he has felt that brace in the change of air to Lyminge from Folkestone which he offered as a reason for his being where we met him. But he liked Lyminge, he said, and if one does not care much for the movements of great cities there may be worse places than the church-yard of Lyminge, where we left him in the waning light, gently pushing, not scraping, the moss from
—the lay
Graved on a stone beneath the aged thorn.
If the reader thinks we were too easily satisfied with the events of our excursion, he can hardly deny that the children and their mothers or aunts or governesses getting into the trains at the little country stations, with their hands full of wild flowers, and eyes bluer than their violets, were more than we had a right to. When at one of these stations a young man, with county-family writ large upon his face and person and raiment, escaped from a lady who talked him into the train, and then almost talked him out of it before it could start, we felt our cup run over. We instantly dramatized, out of our superabundant English fiction, the familiar situation of the pushing and the pushed which is always repeating itself; and in the lady’s fawning persistence, and his solid, stolid resistance we had a moment of the sort of social comedy which should provoke tears rather than smiles. But the pushed always yield to the pusher in the end. This adamantine aristocrat, if such he was, was ultimately to be as putty between the fingers of the parvenue, if such she was, and since she was middle-aged enough to be the mother of a marriageable daughter we foresaw her ultimately giving him her child with tears of triumph.
Travel is obliged to make up these little romances, or else it is apt to feel that it has had no genteel experiences, since it necessarily moves on the surfaces and edges of life. I was glad of any chance of the sort, and even of the humbler sort of thing which offered itself more explicitly, such as the acquaintance of a milkman and a retired exciseman, with whom I found myself walking outside of the pretty town of Rye on a May morning of sunny rain. At the entrance of a hop-field, where there was a foot-path inviting our steps across lots, the milkman eliminated himself with his cans and left us with the fact that hop-raising was not everything to the farmer that could be wished, and that if, after all his expenses, he could clear up a pound an acre at the end of the season, he was lucky. Up to that moment our discourse had been commonplace and business-like, but now it became sociological, it became metaphysical, it became spiritual, as befitted the conversation of a Scotchman and an American. The Englishman had been civil and been kind; he was intelligent enough in the range of his experiences; but he was not so vividly all there as the Scotch body, who eagerly inquired of the state of Presbyterianism among us. He did not push the question as to my own religious persuasion, but I met nowhere any Briton so generally interested in us. In the feeling promoted by this interest of his, we united in a good opinion of his actual sovereign, whom it was fit, as a pensioner who had been “for-r-ty years in his Majesty’s sar-r-vice,” he should praise as “a good-natured gentleman.” As for the late queen he had no terms to measure his affection and reverence for her. I do not know now by what circuit we had reached these topics from the Scriptural subjects with which we started, or how it was he came to express the strong sense he had of the Saviour’s civility to the woman of Samaria, as something that should be “a lesson to our gentry” in kindly behavior to the poor.
Wherever he now is, I hope my friendly Scot is well, and I am sure he is happy. Our weather included, from the time we met till we parted after crossing the wide salt-marsh stretching between Rye and the sea, every vicissitude of sun and rain, with once a little hail; but I remember only an unclouded sky, which I think was his personal firmament. I left him at the little house of the daughter whom he said he was visiting, outside the only town-gate that remains to Rye from its mediæval fortifications. There is a small parade, or promenade, at a certain point near by, fenced with peaceful guns, from which one may overlook all that wide level stretching to the sea—with a long gash of ship-channel and boats tilted by the ebb on its muddy shores—and carrying the eye to the houses and vessels of the port. Rye itself was once much more impressively the port, but the sea left it long and long ago, standing like the bold headland it was, and still must look like when the fog washes in about its feet. It is an endearing little town, one of hundreds (I had almost said thousands) in England, with every comfort in the compass of its cosey streets; with a church, old, old, but not too dotingly Norman, and a lane opening from it to the door of a certain house where one might almost live on the entrancing perspective of its tower and its graveyard trees. A damp blind beggar on a stone, who was never dry in his life, and was, of course, a mere mass of rheumatic aches and pains, is a feature common to so many perspectives in England that he need not be dwelt upon. What is precious about Rye is that with its great charm it does not insist upon being dramatically different from those hundreds or thousands of other lovely old towns. It keeps its history to itself, and I would no more invite the reader to intrude upon its past than I would ask him to join me in invading the private affairs of any English gentleman. A few people who know its charm come down from London for the summer months; but there is a reasonable hope that it will never be newer or other than it is. I myself would not have it changed in the least particular. I should like to go there May after May as long as the world stands, and hang upon the parapet of the small parade and look dreamfully seaward over the prairie-like level, and presently find myself joined by a weak-eyed, weak-voiced elder who draws my attention to the blossoming hawthorns beside us. One is white and one is pink, and between them is a third of pinkish-white. He wishes to know if it is so because the bees have inoculated it, and being of the mild make he is, he rather asks than asserts, “They do inockerlate ’em, sir?”
IX
OXFORD
THE friendly gentleman in our railway carriage who was good enough to care for my interest in the landscape between London and Oxford (I began to express it as soon as we got by a very broad, bad smell waiting our train, midway, in the region of some sort of chemical works) said he was going to Oxford for the Eights. Then we knew that we were going there for the Eights, too, though as to what the Eights are I have never been able to be explicit with myself to this day, beyond the general fact that they are intercollegiate boat-races and implicate Bumps, two of which we saw with satisfaction in due time. But while the towers of Oxford were growing from the plain, a petrified efflorescence of the past, lovelier than any new May-wrought miracle of leaf and flower, we had no thought but for Oxford, and Eights and Bumps were mere vocables no more resolvable into their separate significances than the notes of the jargoning rooks flying over the fields, or the noises of the station where each of our passengers was welcomed by at least three sons or brothers, and kept from claiming somebody else’s boxes in the confiding distributions from the luggage-vans. As our passengers were mostly mothers and sisters, their boxes easily outnumbered them, and if a nephew and cousin or next friend had lent his aid in their rescue in the worst cases, it could not have been superfluous. The ancient town is at other times a stronghold of learning, obedient to a tradition of cloistered men in whom the cloistered monk of other days still lingers, but at this happy time it was overflowed to its very citadel by a tide of feathered hats, of clinging and escaping scarfs, of fluffy skirts in all angelic colors; and I should not be true to that first impression of the meetings at the station, if I did not say that the meeters were quite lost, and well lost, in the multitude of the met. When they issued together from the place these contributed their advantageous disproportion to the effect of the streets, from which they swept the proper university life into corners and doorways, and up alleys and against walls, before their advancing flood.
Our own friend who, lief and dear as any son or brother or nephew or cousin of them all, came flying on the wings of his academic gown to greet us at the station, had in a wonderfully little while divined our baggage, and had it and us in an open carriage making a progress into the heart of the beautiful grove of towers, which nearer to, we perceived was no petrification, but a living growth from the soul of the undying youth coming age after age to perpetuate the university there. We began at once to see the body of this youth chasing singly or plurally down the streets, in tasselled mortar-boards, and gowns clipped of their flow, to an effect of alpaca jackets. Youth can, or must, stand anything, and at certain hours of the morning and evening no undergraduate may show himself in Oxford streets without this abbreviated badge of learning, though the streets were that day so full of people thronging to the Eights and the Bumps that studious youth in the ordinary garb of the unstudious could hardly have awakened