Part 32

"Strange," said Ellaline, yesterday, "how a person will pay lots of money to buy a motor-car, and go tearing about the world at great expense, to gratify two little black or blue holes in his face; and then, instead of letting the holes thoroughly absorb his money's worth, he will rush past some of the best things on earth rather than 'spoil a run.'" But she doesn't take the intoxication of ozone into consideration in this indictment.

Our road was of the best, and always interesting, with some fine distant views, and here and there an avenue of trees like a vast Gothic aisle in a cathedral. "We could see things so nicely if it weren't for the mists!" sighed Emily, who, if her wish had been a broom, would have ruthlessly swept away those lacy cobwebs clinging to the hill-sides. "Why," replied Ellaline, "you could see a bride's face more clearly if you took away her veil, but it's the prettiest thing about her." That put my feelings in a nutshell. England would be no bride for me if she threw away her veil; and nowhere did it become her more than in Dorset, Somerset, and Devon, where it is threaded with gold and embroidered with jewels toward the edge of sunset.

Of course, there's only the most fanciful dividing line between Somerset and Devon, yet I imagine the two counties different in their attributes, as well as in their graces. Surely in Somerset the Downs are on a grander scale. Between two of them you are in a valley, and think that you see mountains. In Devonshire you have wider horizons, save for the lanes and hedges, which do their best to keep straying eyes fastened on their own beauty.

I suppose men who never have left England take such beauty for granted, but to me, after the flaunting luxuriance of the East, it is enchanting. I notice everything. I want someone, who cares for it as I do, to admire it with me. If it weren't for Dick Burden this England would be making me twenty-one again.

You should see, to understand me, all the lovely things fighting sportively for supremacy in these Devonshire hedges; the convolvulus pretending to throttle the honeysuckle; the honeysuckle shaking creamy fists in the faces of roses that push out, blushing in the starlight of wild clematis, white and purple. Such gentle souls, these Devonshire roses! Kind and innocent, like the sweet, sentimental "Evelinas" of old-fashioned stories, yet full of health, and tingling with buds, as a young girl with fancies.

Devonshire seems to express herself in flowers, as sterner counties do in trees and rocks. Even the children one meets playing in the road are flowers. They are to the pretty cottages what the sweetbriar is to the hedges; and no background could be daintier for the little human blossoms than those same thatched cottages with open, welcoming doors.

Ellaline, fascinated by glimpses through open doors--(old oak dressers set with blue and white china; ancient clocks with peering moon-faces; high-backed chairs; bright flowers in gilt vases on gate-legged tables, all obscurely seen through rich brown shadows)--says she would like to live in such a cottage with somebody she loved. Who will that somebody be? I constantly wonder. I should think less of her if it could be Dick Burden, or one of his type, yet Mrs. Senter hints that the girl likes his society. Can she?

We had a picnic luncheon on our way to Sidmouth, lingering rather long (once you have stopped your motor, nothing matters. If you're happy, you are as reluctant to go on as you are to stop when going). Then, as they all wished to travel by moonlight, I suggested that dinner also should be a picnic. We bought food and drink at Honiton, and the country being exquisite between there and Sidmouth, we soon found a moss-carpeted, tree-roofed dining-room, fit for an emperor. Nearby glimmered a sheet of blue-bells, like a blue underground lake that had broken through and flooded the meadow. Ellaline said she would like to wash her face in it, as if in a fairy cosmetic, to make her "beautiful forever." I really don't believe she knows that would be superfluous trouble! And a fairy godmother has given her the gift of song. I wish you could hear her sing, Pat. I have heard her only once; but if I hadn't been a fool already, I'd have become one then, beyond recall.

So we sat there, on the still, blue brink of twilight, till the moon rose red as a molten helmet, and cooled to a silver bowl as she sailed higher, dripping light. But tell me this: Would I think of such similes if I weren't like a man who has eaten hasheesh and filled his brain with a fantastic tumult--a magical vision of romance, such as his heart never knew in its youth, never can know except in visions, now that youth has passed? There's joy as well as pain in the vision, though, I can tell you, as there must be in any mirage. And it was in a mirage of moonlight and mystery that we took up our journey again, after that second picnic, swooping bird-like, from hill to valley, on our way to the Knoll Park Hotel.

It's an historic place, by the way, with an interesting past--once it was a country house belonging to an eccentric gentleman--and at present it is extremely ornamental among its lawns and Lebanon cedars.

As for Sidmouth the town, you have but to enter it to feel that you are walking in a quaint old coloured lithograph--one of the eighteenth-century sort, you know, that the artist invariably dedicated, with extravagant humility, to a marquis, if he didn't know a duke!

There's no architecture whatever. As far as that is concerned, children might have built the original village of Sidmouth as they sat playing on the beach; but the queer cottages, with their low brows of mouse-coloured thatch, protruding amid absurd battlements, have a fantastic charm. They are most engaging, with their rustic-framed bow-windows, like surprised-looking eyes in spectacles; their green veranda-eyebrows, and their smiling, yellow-stucco faces, with low foreheads. The house where Queen Victoria stopped as a little girl is a great show place, of course, and is like a toy flung down against a cushiony hillside, a battlemented doll's house, forgotten by the child who let it fall, while big trees grew up and tried to hide it.

Two cliffs has Sidmouth, and an innocent esplanade, and--that is about all, except the toy town itself. But it's a place to stay in. A happy man would never tire of it, I think. An unhappy one might prefer Brighton--or Monte Carlo. I am neither one nor the other. So I prefer a motor-car. We are on the wing again to-morrow.

I must now go to our sitting-room, which looks over the sea, and play a rubber of bridge with Mrs. Senter, Emily, and Burden. Ellaline doesn't play.

Hope I haven't bored you with my Burden, and other complaints.

Yours ever,

Pen.

Later, August 2nd, Night

I have opened my letter again, to tell you what came of that rubber of bridge.

I've lost--all the glamour. The reaction after the hasheesh has set in.

We didn't play long. Just that one rubber, and before we finished Ellaline had taken her copy of "Lorna Doone" upstairs to her own room, without interrupting our game for a good-night. She didn't think we saw her go; but there were two of us who did. Burden was one of the two. I don't need to tell you who the other fool was.

Mrs. Senter and I were partners, as we generally are, if there's any bridge going in the evening. She's devoted to the game, and it's always she who proposes it. I would generally prefer to fag up our route for next day with guide-books and road-maps. But hosts, like beggars, can't be "choosers."

Well, to-night Emily and Burden had all the cards, and Burden wanted a second rubber, but his aunt doesn't like losing her money to her nephew, even though we play for childishly low stakes. She said she "knew that Mrs. Norton was tired," and Emily didn't deny the soft impeachment, as she plays bridge in the same way she would do district visiting during an epidemic of measles--because it is her duty.

Dick had the latest French imitation of Sherlock Holmes to read, and a box of Egyptian cigarettes to smoke (mine), which he evidently thinks too young for me. Emily had some embroidery, which I seem to remember that she began when I was a boy, and kept religiously to do in hotels. (But what is there that my good sister does, which she does not do religiously?) Mrs. Senter had nothing to amuse or occupy her--except your humble servant--consequently she suggested a stroll in the garden before bedtime.

She was almost beautiful in the moonlight, quite ethereal-looking, and her hair a nimbus for that small white face of hers; just as small, just as white, and just as smooth as when those big eyes used to look up into our eyes under an Indian moon. And she is always agreeable, always witty, or at least "smart." Still, I must confess that I was ungallantly absent-minded until something she said waked me up from a brown study.

"He really is a nice boy," she was saying, "and after all, it's a tribute to your distinguished qualities that he should be afraid to speak to you."

I guessed at once that she must have been talking of her nephew.

"What is he afraid to say to me?" I enquired.