If this was not, strictly speaking, a concert, that was certainly a concert which I attended one evening at a Baptist chapel, where a company of Welsh miners sang like a company of Welsh angels. I was in hopes they would have sung in Welsh, which, as is well known, was the language of Paradise, but they sang in English as good as English ever can be in comparison; and instead of Bardic measures, it was all terribly classic, or when not classic, religious. As I say, though, the voices were divine, and I asked myself if such heavenly sounds could issue, at this remove, from the bowels of the Welsh mountains, what must be the cherubinic choiring from their tops! It was a very simple-hearted affair, that concert, and well encouraged by a large and cordial audience, thanks mostly, perhaps, to the vigilance of the lady pickets stationed down the lane leading to the chapel, and quite into the street, with tickets for sale, who let no hesitating passers escape. I myself pleaded a sovereign in defence, but one of the fair pickets changed it with instant rapture, and I was left without excuse for the indecision in which I had gone out to see whether I would really go to the concert.
For the matter of that we were without excuse for staying on in Malvern, save that it was so very, very pleasant though so very, very dull. It was there, I think, that I formed the Spanish melon habit, which I indulged thereafter throughout that summer, till the fogs of London reformed me at end of September, when no more melons came from Spain. The average of Spanish melons in England is so much better than that of our cantaloupes at home that I advise all lovers of the generous fruit to miss no chance of buying them. The fruiterer who sold me my first in Malvern, said that in the palmy days of the place many Americans used to come, and he mentioned a New York millionaire of his acquaintance so confidently that I almost thought he was mine, and felt much more at home than before. I had more talk with this kind fruiterer than with any one else in Malvern, though I will not depreciate an interview with a jobbing mechanic from far Norfolk, who spent an afternoon washing our windows, and was conversible when once you started his torpid flow. He did not grasp ultra-Norfolk ideas readily, and he altogether lacked the brilliant fancy of the gay, rusty, frowsy ragged tramp who came one afternoon with a bunch of cat-tail rushes for sale, and who had vividly conceived of himself as a steel-polisher out of work. He might not have been mistaken; but if he was it could not spoil my pleasure in him, or in the weather which had now begun to be very beautiful, with blue skies almost cloudless, and quite agreeably hot. It being the 12th of August, a bank holiday fell on that day, and the town filled up with trippers (mysteriously much objected to in England), who seemed mostly lovers, and who arm in arm passed through our street. One indeed there was who passed without companionship, playing the accordeon, his eyes fixed in a rapture with his own music.
On several other days the town seemed the less reasoned resort of crowds of harmless young people, who perhaps thought they were seeing the world there, since it was the height of the Malvern season. They were at one time more definitely attracted by the Flower Show at the neighboring seat of a great nobleman, which was opened by his lady with due ceremonies, and which enjoyed a greater popular favor. I myself followed with the trippers there, partly because I had long read of that kind of English thing without seeing it, and because in the spacious leisure of Malvern it was difficult to invent occupations that would fill the time between luncheon and dinner, even with an hour out for an afternoon nap.
It was just a pleasant drive to the nobleman’s place, and my progress was attended by a sentiment of circus-day in the goers and comers on foot and in fly, and the loungers strewn on the grass of the road-sides and the open lots. At the gate of the nobleman’s grounds, we paid a modest entrance, and there were still modester fees for several of the exhibits. One of these was a tent where under a strong magnifying-glass a community of ants were offering their peculiar domestic and social economy to the study of the curious. But, if I rightly remember, the pavilion which sheltered the flower-show was free to all who could walk through its sultry air without stifling; it was really not so much a show of flowers as of fruits and vegetables, which indeed bore the heat better. Another free performance was the rivalry, apparently of amateurs, in simple feats of carpentry and joiner-work as applied to fence-building; but this was of a didactic effect from which it was a relief to turn to the idle and useless adventures of the people who lost themselves in a maze, or labyrinthine hedge and shared the innocent hilarity of the spectators watching their bewilderment from a high ground hard by. All the time there was a band playing, which when it played a certain familiar rag-time measure was loudly applauded and forced to play it again and again. It was a proud moment for the exile from a country whose black step-children had contributed these novel motives to the world’s music, in the intervals of being lynched.
The scene was all very familiar and very strange, with qualities of a subdued county fair at home, but more ordered and directed than such things are with us. As I say, I had long known its like in literature, and I was now glad to find it so realistic. My pleasure in it overflowed when the nobleman who had lent his premises for the show, came walking out among the people, bareheaded, in a suit of summer gray, with his lady beside him, and paused to speak, amid the general emotion, with a neat old woman of humble class, whose hand his lady had shaken. That, I said to myself, was quite as it should be in its allegiance to immemorial tradition and its fidelity to fiction; it could have formed the initial moment of a hundred thousand English novels. If it could not have formed a like moment in American romance, it is because our millionaires, in their shyness of subpœnas or of interviews, do not yet open their private grounds for flower-shows. It needs many centuries to mellow the conditions for the effect I had witnessed, and we must not be impatient.
The lord and his lady had come out of a mansion that did not look very mediæval, though it had a moat round it, with ducks in the moat, and in the way to its portal a force of footmen to confirm any comer in his misgiving that the house was closed to the public, and to direct him to the pleasaunce beyond. This was a lawned and gardened place, enclosed with a green wall of hedge, and guarded on one side with succession of pedestals bearing classic busts. It was charming in the afternoon sun, with groups of people seriously, if somewhat awe-strickenly, enjoying themselves. The inferiors in England never take that ironical attitude towards their superiors which must long delay a real classification of society with us.
When there one accepts the situation, and becomes at least gentry if one can, with all the assumptions and responsibilities which station implies. I had a curious illustration of this in my own case when once I came to pay the driver of my fly at the end of an excursion. It had always been my theory that if only the people who exact tips would say what tip they expected, it would greatly simplify and clarify the affair. But now when this good-fellow said the fly would be twelve shillings for the two hours, which I mutely thought too much, and then added, “And two shillings for me,” I did not like it as well as my theory should have supported me in doing. Had I possibly been meaning to offer him one shilling? Heaven knows; but I found myself on the point of lecturing him for his greed, when I reflected that it would be of no use, at least in Malvern, for in Malvern when I went to a stable to engage a fly for other excursions, they always said it would be so much, and so much more for the driver. His tip, a good third of the whole cost, seemed an unwritten part of the tariff, but it was an inflexible law.
It is strong proof of the pleasantness of the drives that this novel feature could not spoil them for us, and we were always going them. There were pretty villages lurking all about in the shades of that lovely plain, which if you passed through them on a Sunday afternoon, for example, had their people out in their best, with comely girls seen through the open doors of the above cottages, apparently waiting for company, or, in its defect, sitting on benches in their flowery door-yards and making believe to read.
The way was sometimes between tall ranks of trees, sometimes through lines of hedge, opening at the hamlets and closing beyond them. Once it ran by a vast