Penelope's Postscripts

“Aren’t they the tidiest, most self-respecting, satisfying things!” exclaimed Egeria, as she took out her plate, and knife, and fork, opened her Japanese napkin, set in dainty order the cold fowl and ham, the pat of butter, crusty roll, bunch of lettuce, mustard and salt, the corkscrew, and, finally, the bottle of ale.  “I cannot bear to be unpatriotic, but compare this with the ten minutes for refreshments at an American lunch-counter, its baked beans, and pies, and its cream cakes and doughnuts under glass covers.  I don’t believe English people are as good as we are; they can’t be; they’re too comfortable.  I wonder if the little discomforts of living in America, the dissatisfaction and incompetency of servants, and all the other problems, will work out for the nation a more exceeding weight of glory, or whether they will simply ruin the national temper.”

“It’s wicked to be too luxurious, Egeria,” said Tommy, with a sly look at Atlas.  “It’s the hair shirt, not the pearl-studded bosom, that induces virtue.”

“Is it?” she asked innocently, letting her clear gaze follow Tommy’s.  “You don’t believe, Mr. Atlas, that modest people like you, and me, and Tommy, and the Copleys, incur danger in being too comfortable; the trouble lies in the fact that the other half is too uncomfortable, does it not?  But I am just beginning to think of these things,” she added soberly.

“Egeria,” said Mrs. Jack sternly, “you may think about them as much as you like; I have no control over your mental processes, but if you mention single tax, or tenement-house reform, or Socialism, or altruism, or communism, or the sweating system, you will be dropped at Bideford.  Atlas is only travelling with us because he needs complete moral and intellectual rest.  I hope, oh, how I hope, that there isn’t a social problem in Clovelly!  It seems as if there couldn’t be, in a village of a single street and that a stone staircase.”

“There will be,” I said, “if nothing more than the problem of supply and demand; of catching and selling herrings.”

We had time at Bideford to go into a quaint little shop for tea before starting on our twelve-mile drive; time also to be dragged by Tommy to Bideford Bridge, that played so important a part in Kingsley’s “Westward Ho!”  We did not approach Clovelly finally through the beautiful Hobby Drive, laid out in former years by one of the Hamlyn ladies of Clovelly Court, but by the turnpike road, which, however, was not uninteresting.  It had been market-day at Bideford and there were many market carts and “jingoes” on the road, with perhaps a heap of yellow straw inside and a man and a rosy boy on the seat.  The roadway was prettily bordered with broom, wild honeysuckle, fox-glove, and single roses, and there was a certain charming post-office called the Fairy Cross, in a garden of blooming fuchsias, where Egeria almost insisted upon living and officiating as postmistress.

All at once our driver checked his horses on the brink of a hill, apparently leading nowhere in particular.

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Jack, who is always expecting accidents.

“Clovelly, mum.”

“Clovelly!” we repeated automatically, gazing about us on every side for a roof, a chimney, or a sign of habitation.

“You’ll find it, mum, as you walk down-along.”

“How charming!” cried Egeria, who loves the picturesque.  “Towns are generally so obtrusive; isn’t it nice to know that Clovelly is here and that all we have to do is to walk ‘down-along’ and find it?  Come, Tommy.  Ho, for the stone staircase!”

We who were left behind discovered by more questioning that one cannot drive into Clovelly; that although an American president or an English chancellor might, as a great favour, be escorted down on a donkey’s back, or carried down in a sedan chair if he chanced to have one about his person, the ordinary mortal must walk to the door of the New Inn, his luggage being dragged “down-along” on sledges and brought “up-along” on donkeys.  In a word, Clovelly is not built like unto other towns; it seems to have been flung up from the sea into a narrow rift between wooded hills, and to have clung there these eight hundred years of its existence.  It has held fast, but it has not expanded, for the very good reason that it completely fills the hollow in the cliffs, the houses clinging like limpets to the rocks on either side, so that it would be a costly and difficult piece of engineering indeed to build any extensions or additions.

We picked our way “down-along” until we caught the first glimpse of white-washed cottages covered with creepers, their doors hospitably open, their windows filled with blooming geraniums and fuchsias.  All at once, as we began to descend the winding, rocky pathway, we saw that it pitched headlong into the bluest sea in the world.  No wonder the painters have loved it!  Shall we ever forget that first vision!  There were a couple of donkeys coming “up-along” laden, one with coals, the other with bread-baskets; a fisherman was mending his nets in front of his door; others were lounging “down to quay pool” to prepare for their evening drift-fishing.  A little further on, at a certain abrupt turning called the “lookout,” where visitors stop to breathe and villagers to gossip, one could catch a glimpse of the beach and “Crazed Kate’s Cottage,” the drying-ground for nets, the lifeboat house, the pier, and the breakwater.

We were all enchanted when we arrived at the door of the inn.

“Devonshire for me!  I shall live here!” cried Mrs. Jack.  “I said that a few times in Wales, but I retract it.  You had better live here, too, Atlas; there aren’t any problems in Clovelly.”

“I am sure of that,” he assented smilingly.  “I noticed dozens of live snails in the rocks of the street as we came down; snails cannot live in combination with problems.”

“Then I am a snail,” answered Mrs. Jack cheerfully; “for that is exactly my temperament.”

We found that we could not get room enough for all at the tiny inn, but this only exhilarated Egeria and Tommy.  They disappeared and came back triumphant ten minutes later.

“We got lodgings without any difficulty,” said Egeria.  “Tommy’s isn’t half bad; we saw a small boy who had been taking a box ‘down-along’ on a sledge, and he referred us to a nice place where they took Tommy in; but you should see my lodging—it is ideal.  I noticed the prettiest yellow-haired girl knitting in a doorway.  ‘There isn’t room for me at the inn,’ I said; ‘could you let me sleep here?’  She asked her mother, and her mother said ‘Yes,’ and there was never anything so romantic as my vine-embowered window.  Juliet would have jumped at it.”

“She would have jumped out of it, if Romeo had been below,” said Mrs. Jack, “but there are no Romeos nowadays; they are all busy settling the relations of labour and capital.”

The New Inn proved some years ago to be too small for its would-be visitors.  An addition couldn’t be built because there wasn’t any room; but the landlady succeeded in getting a house across the way.  Here there are bedrooms, a sort of quiet tap-room of very great respectability, and the kitchens.  As the dining-room is in house number one, the matter of serving dinner might seem to be attended with difficulty, but it is not apparent.  The maids run across the narrow street with platters and dishes surmounted by great Britannia covers, and in rainy weather they give the soup or joint the additional protection of a large cotton umbrella.  The walls of every room in the inn are covered with old china, much of it pretty, and some of it valuable, though the finest pieces are not hung, but are placed in glass cabinets.  One cannot see an inch of wall space anywhere in bedrooms, dining- or sitting-rooms for the huge delft platters, whole sets of the old green dragon pattern, quaint perforated baskets, pitchers and mugs of British lustre, with queer dogs, and cats, and peacocks, and clocks of china.  The massing of colour is picturesque and brilliant, and the whole effect decidedly unique.  The landlady’s father and grandfather had been Bideford sea-captains and had brought here these and other treasures from foreign parts.  As Clovelly is a village of seafolk and fisher-folk, the houses are full of curiosities, mostly from the Mediterranean.  Egeria had no china in her room, but she had huge branches of coral, shells of all sizes and hues, and an immense coloured print of the bay of Naples.  Tommy’s landlady was volcanic in her tastes, and his walls were lined with pictures of Vesuvius in all stages of eruption.  My room, a wee, triangular box of a thing, was on the first floor of the inn.  It opened hospitably on a bit of garden and street by a large glass door that wouldn’t shut, so that a cat or a dog spent the night by my bed-side now and then, and many a donkey tried to do the same, but was evicted.

Oh, the Clovelly mornings! the sunshine, the salt air, the savour of the boats and the nets, the limestone cliffs of Gallantry Bower rising steep and white at the head of the village street, with the brilliant sea at the foot; the walks down by the quay pool (not key pool, you understand, but quaäy püül in the vernacular), the sails in a good old herring-boat called the Lorna Doone, for we are in Blackmore’s country here.

We began our first day early in the morning, and met at nine-o’clock breakfast in the coffee-room.  Egeria came in glowing.  She reminds me of a phrase in a certain novel, where the heroine is described as always dressing (seemingly) to suit the season and the sky.  Clad in sea-green linen with a white collar, and belt, she was the very spirit of a Clovelly morning.  She had risen at six, and in company with Phoebe, daughter of her house (the yellow-haired lassie mentioned previously), had prowled up and down North Hill, a transverse place or short street much celebrated by painters.  They had met a certain bold fisher-lad named Jem, evidently Phoebe’s favourite swain, and explored the short passage where Fish Street is built over, nicknamed Temple Bar.

Atlas came in shortly after and laid a nosegay at Egeria’s plate.

“My humble burnt-offering, your ladyship,” he said.

Tommy: “She has lots of offerings, but she generally prefers to burn ’em herself.  When Egeria’s swains talk about her, it is always ‘ut vidi,’ how I saw, succeeded by ‘ut perii,’ how I sudden lost my brains.”

Egeria: “You don’t indulge in burnt-offerings” (laughing, with slightly heightened colour); “but how you do burn incense!  You speak as if the skeletons of my rejected suitors were hanging on imaginary lines all over the earth’s surface.”

Tommy: “They are not hanging on ‘imaginary’ lines.”

Mrs. Jack: “Turn your thoughts from Egeria’s victims, you frivolous people, and let me tell you that I’ve been ‘up-along’ this morning and found—what do you think?—a library: a circulating library maintained by the Clovelly Court people.  It is embowered in roses and jasmine, and there is a bird’s nest hanging just outside one of the open windows next to a shelf of Dickens and Scott.  Never before have young families of birds been born and brought up with similar advantages.  The snails were in the path just as we saw them yesterday evening, Atlas; not one has moved, not one has died!  Oh, I certainly must come and live here.  The librarian is a dear old lady; if she ever dies, I am coming to take her place.  You will be postmistress at the Fairy Cross then, Egeria, and we’ll visit each other.  And I’ve brought Dickens’ ‘Message from the Sea’ for you, and Kingsley’s ‘Westward Ho!’ for Tommy, and ‘The Wages of Sin’ for Atlas, and ‘Hypatia’ for Egeria, ‘Lorna Doone’ for Jack, and Charles Kingsley’s sermons for myself.  We will read aloud every evening.”

“I won’t,” said Tommy succinctly.  “I’ve been down by the quay pool, and I’ve got acquainted with a lot of A1 chaps that have agreed to take me drift-fishing every night, and they are going to put out the Clovelly lifeboat for exercise this week, and if the weather is fine, Bill Marks is going to take Atlas and me to Lundy Island.  You don’t catch me round the evening lamp very much in Clovelly.”

“Don’t be too slangy, Tommy, and who on earth is Bill Marks?” asked Jack.

“He’s our particular friend, Tommy’s and mine,” answered Atlas, seeing that Tommy was momentarily occupied with bacon and eggs.  “He told us more yarns than we ever before heard spun in the same length of time.  He is seventy-seven, and says he was a teetotaler until he was sixty-nine, but has been trying to make up time ever since.  From his condition last evening, I should say he was likely to do it.  He was so mellow, I asked him how he could manage to walk down the staircase.  ‘Oh, I can walk down neat enough,’ he said, ‘when I’m in good sailing trim, as I am now, feeling just good enough, but not too good, your honour; but when I’m half seas over or three sheets in the wind, I roll down, your honour!’  He spends three shillings a week for his food and the same for his ‘rummidge.’  He was thrilling when he got on the subject of the awful wreck just outside this harbour, ‘the fourth of October, seventy-one years ago, two-and-thirty men drowned, your honour, and half of ’em from Clovelly parish.  And I was one of the three men saved in another storm twenty-four years agone, when two-and-twenty men were drowned; that’s what it means to plough the great salt field that is never sown, your honour.’  When he found we’d been in Scotland, he was very anxious to know if we could talk ‘Garlic,’ said he’d always wanted to know what it sounded like.”

Somehow, in the days that followed, Tommy was always with his particular friends, the fishermen, on the beach, at the Red Lion, or in the shop of a certain boat-builder, learning the use of the calking-iron.  Mr. and Mrs. Jack, Aunt Celia, and I unexpectedly found ourselves a quartette for hours together, while Egeria and Atlas walked in the churchyard, in the beautiful grounds of Clovelly Court, or in the deer park, where one finds as perfect a union of marine and woodland scenery as any in England.

Atlas may have taken her there because he could discuss single tax more eloquently when he was walking over the entailed estates of the English landed gentry, but I suspect that single tax had taken off its hat, and bowing profoundly to Egeria, had said, “After you, Madam!” and retired to its proper place in the universe; for not even the most blatant economist would affirm that any other problem can be so important as that which confronts a man when he enters that land of Beulah, which is upon the borders of Heaven and within sight of the City of Love.

Atlas was young, warm of heart, high of mind, and generous of soul.  All the necessary chords, therefore, were in him, ready to be set in vibration.  No one could do this more cunningly than Egeria; the only question was whether love would “run out to meet love,” as it should, “with open arms.”

We simply waited to see.  Mrs. Jack, with that fine lack of logic that distinguished her, disclaimed all responsibility.  “He is awake, at least,” she said, “and that is a great comfort; and now and then he observes a few very plain facts, mostly relating to Egeria, it is true.  If it does come to anything, I hope he won’t ask her to live in a college settlement the year round, though I haven’t the slightest doubt that she would like it.  If there were ever two beings created expressly for each other, it is these two, and for that reason I have my doubts about the matter.  Almost all marriages are made between two people who haven’t the least thing in common, so far as outsiders can judge.  Egeria and Atlas are almost too well suited for marriage.”

The progress of the affair had thus far certainly been astonishingly rapid, but it might mean nothing.  Egeria’s mind and heart were so easy of access up to a certain point that the traveller sometimes overestimated the distance covered and the distance still to cover.  Atlas quoted something about her at the end of the very first day, that described her charmingly: “Ordinarily, the sweetest ladies will make us pass through cold mist and cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before the formalities are cleared away, to grant us rights of citizenship.  She is like those frank lands where we have not to hand out a passport at the frontier and wait for dubious inspection.”  But the description is incomplete.  Egeria, indeed, made no one wait at the frontier for a dubious inspection of his passport; but once in the new domain, while he would be cordially welcomed to parks, gardens, lakes, and pleasure grounds, he would find unexpected difficulty in entering the queen’s private apartments, a fact that occasioned surprise to some of the travellers.

We all took the greatest interest, too, in the romance of Phoebe and Jem, for the course of true love did not run at all smooth for this young couple.  Jack wrote a ballad about her, and Egeria made a tune to it, and sang it to the tinkling, old-fashioned piano of an evening:—

“Have you e’er seen the street of Clovelly?
The quaint, rambling street of Clovelly,
With its staircase of stone leading down to the sea,
To the harbour so sleepy, so old, and so wee,
The queer, crooked street of Clovelly.

“Have you e’er seen the lass of Clovelly?
The sweet little lass of Clovelly,
With kirtle of grey reaching just to her knee,
And ankles as neat as ankles may be,
The yellow-haired lass of Clovelly.

“There’s a good honest lad in Clovelly,
A bold, fisher lad of Clovelly,
With purpose as straight and swagger as free
As the course of his boat when breasting a sea,
The brave sailor lad of Clovelly.

“Have you e’er seen the church at Clovelly?
Have you heard the sweet bells of Clovelly?
The lad and the lassie will hear them, maybe,
And join hand in hand to sail over life’s sea