Part 12

It is a sincere tribute to the intrinsic charm of Egeria’s character that Mrs. Jack and I admire her so unreservedly, for she is for ever being hurled at us as an example in cases where men are too stupid to see that there is no fault in us, nor any special virtue in her. For instance, Jack tells Kitty that she could walk with less fatigue if she wore sensible shoes like Egeria’s. Now, Egeria’s foot is very nearly as lovely as Trilby’s in the story, and much prettier than Trilby’s in the pictures; consequently, she wears a hideous, broad-toed, low-heeled boot, and looks trim and neat in it. Her hair is another contested point: she dresses it in five minutes in the morning, walks or drives in the rain and wind for a few hours, rides in the afternoon, bathes in the surf, lies in a hammock, and, if circumstances demand, the creature can smooth it with her hands and walk in to dinner! Kitty and I, on the contrary, rise a half-hour earlier to curl or wave; our spirit-lamps leak into our dressing-bags, and our beauty is decidedly damaged by damp or hot weather. Most women’s hair is a mere covering to the scalp, growing out of the head, or pinned on, as the case may be. Egeria’s is a glory like Eve’s; it is expressive, breathing a hundred delicate suggestions of herself; not tortured into frizzles, or fringes, or artificial shapes, but winding its lustrous lengths about her head, just high enough to show the beautiful nape of her neck, “where this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls run truant from the knot,—curls, half curls, root curls, vine ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps,—all these wave, or fall, or stray, loose and downward in the form of small, silken paws, hardly any of them thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long, round locks of gold to trick the heart.”

At one o’clock we lifted the covers of our luncheon-baskets.

“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.