Certain delightful English towns, with glimpses of the pleasant country between

by William Dean Howells

Before this he had remarked that we should find the drouth much worse as we went on, for we were now in the Valley of the Thames, which kept the land comparatively moist. But I could not see that the levels of harvest beyond this favored region were different. Still the generous yield of grain half covered the ground; the fires along the embankments continued in places; in places the hay was just mown, and women were tossing it into windrows; at a country station where we stopped there were fat, heavy-fleeced sheep panting wofully in the cattle-pens; but the heat was no worse than it had been. The landscape grew more varied as we approached Worcester, where we meant to pass the night; low hills rose from the plain, softly wooded; and I find from my note-book that the weather was much mitigated by the amenity of all the inhabitants we encountered. I really suppose that the underlined record, “universal politeness,” related mainly to the railway company’s servants, but there must have been some instances of kindness from others, perhaps fellow-travellers, which I grieve now to have forgotten.

I have not forgotten the patience with which the people at the old inn-like hotel in Worcester bore our impatience with the rooms which they showed us, and which we found impossibly stuffy, and smelling of the stables below. The inn was a survival of the coaching days, when the stables formed an integral part of the public-house, but did not perfume the fiction which has endeared its ideal to readers. The dining-room was sultry, and abounded with the flies which love stables of the olden times, or indeed of any date. We sat by our baggage in an outer room till a carriage could be called, and then we drove back to the station, through the long, hot, dusty street by which we had come, with a poorish, stunted type of work-people crowding it on the way home to supper.

Somewhere in the offing we were aware of cathedral roofs and towers, and we were destined later to a pleasanter impression of Worcester than that from which we now gladly fled by the first train for Great Malvern. Our refuge was only an hour away, and it duly received us in a vast, modern hotel, odorous only of a surrounding garden into which a soft rain was already beginning to fall. A slow, safe elevator, manned by the very oldest and heaviest official in full uniform whom I have ever seen in the like charge, mounted with us to upper chambers, where we knew no more till we awoke in the morning to find the face of nature washed clean by that gentle rain, and her breath fresh and sweet, coming from the grateful lips of the myriad flowers which embloom most English towns.

I may as well note at once that it was not a bracing air which we inhaled from them, and I do not suppose that the air is any more an adjunct of the healing waters at Great Malvern than the air at Carlsbad, for instance, where it is notoriously relaxing. The companionable office-lady at our hotel, who was also a sort of lady-butler, and carved the cold meats, candidly owned that the air at Great Malvern was lifeless, and she boldly regretted the two years she had passed in New England, as matron of a boys’ reformatory. She said, quite in the teeth of an English couple paying their bill at the same time, that she was only living to get back there. They took her impatriotism with a large imperial allowance; and I shall always be sorry I did not ask them what kind of bird it was they had with them in a cage; I think they would have told me willingly, and even gladly, before they drove away.

We were ourselves driving away in search of lodgings, which, whether you like them or not after you find them, it is always so interesting to look up in England. It was our fate commonly to visit places in their season when lodgings were scarce and dear; and it was one of the surprises that Great Malvern had in store for us that it was in the very height of its season. We should never have thought it, but for the assurance of the lodging-house landladies, who united in saying so, and in asking twice their fee as an earnest of good faith. The charming streets, which were not only laterally but vertically irregular, and curved and rose and fell in every direction, were so far from thronged that we were often the only people in them besides the unoccupied drivers of other flies than ours, and the boys who had pony chairs for hire, and demanded height-of-the-season prices for them. Perhaps the fellow-visitors whom we missed from the street were thronging in-doors: the hotels were full up; the boarding-houses could offer only a choice of inferior rooms; the lodgings had nearly all been taken at the rates which astonished if they did not

MALVERN—THE TOWN

dismay us. But we found the pleasantest apartment left at last, and were immediately as much domesticated in it as if we had lived there ever since it was built. In front it faced, across the street, a wooded and gardened steep; in the rear, from the window of our stately sitting-room, we looked out over a vast plain, of tilth and grass and groves, cheered everywhere with farm villages or farm cottages, and the grander edifices of the local nobility and gentry, and the spires of churches. Farther off where the Cotswold Hills began to be blue, glimmered Cheltenham, where we could, with a glass strong enough, have seen the retired military and civil employés of the India service who largely inhabit the place, basking in a summer heat of familiar tropical fervor, and a cheapness suited to their pensions. In the same quarter there was also sometimes visible a blur of dim towers and roofs which the guide-book knew as Tewkesbury; in the opposite direction, Worcester with its cathedral more boldly defined itself. The landscape seemed so altogether, so surpassingly English, that one day when I had nothing better to do—as was mostly the case with me in Malvern—I set down its amiable features, which I wish I could assemble here in a portrait. First, there were orchard and garden trees of our own house (one of a dozen houses on the same curving terrace), with apples, pears, and plums belted in by the larches and firs that deepened towards the foot of the hill. Pretty, well-kept dwellings of more or less state, showed their chimneys and slated or tiled roofs everywhere through the trees and shrubs at the beginning of what looked the level from our elevation. From these the plain stretched on, with hotels and churches salient from rows of red brick and gray stone cottages. Fields, now greening under the rains, but still keeping the warmer colors which the long drouth had given them, were parted into every angular form by rigid hedge-rows. They were fields of oats and grass, and sometimes wheat; but there were no recognizable orchards; and the trees that dotted the fields, singly and in clumps, massed themselves in forest effects in the increasing distance. They covered quite a third of the plain, which stretched twenty miles away on every hand, and were an accent of dark, harsh green amid the yellower tone of the meadows. The Cotswolds rising to the height of the Malvern Hills against the dull horizon (often rainy, now, but dull always), ended the immense level, where, coming or going, the little English railway trains, under their long white plumes of smoke, glided in every direction; and somewhere through the scene the unseen Severn ran.