|
|
Here are some themes that have been selected from the writings. The researcher should read the whole text to give the extract its true context.
The palace stood high--full two hundred feet above the level of the river Thames, which flowed some three miles away--and from its green lawns and stately terraces one could look over the sloping meadows and dark forests to London itself, and see the fine old Cathedral of S. Paul, the Abbey of Westminster, the White Tower, and the Palace of the Savoy. And it was delightsome indeed (as it is to this day) to walk in the midst of flowery meadows and leafy bowers, and to behold in the distance that great city of London, which was wonderful even then, and is still more wonderful now: and to rest for a time in the soft green hush of the country, knowing all the while that the rush and bustle of the busy town were not so very far away.
"I don't think much of your flower-garden as yet," said Eddy; "these people are worse and more brutal than the country people."
"I suppose you never mention your neighbours' affairs, eh?""Well, I do sometimes," said Squire Mordaunt.
"You never talk about anything else," said Aunt Eleanor.
"For me, I love it. It is the only real amusement one has in the country, or in town either."
By which it will be seen that tea at the Junction is very intoxicating, and that young men who live on the moors are sometimes quite as foolish when they are in love as young men in towns.
The town was sordid, the streets shabby, the houses very small. So far as she was able to judge, it was not inhabited by any gentlefolk, as she understood the term, except by a parson or two and a few medical men, and possibly by a lawyer.
Those who lived in the best houses--houses of more than a ground floor and one upper storey, and who had a room on each side of the front door, were also those who worked least, the better-class shopkeepers, such as did not live above their shops. But of these there were few. As to the owners of the tile-yards, the potbanks, and the collieries, they had mansions far away in the country, among trees and flowers, and went to their business by train.
Priscilla, herself, was a town lady, while he was country bred. In his own sight he was coarse, clumsy, ungainly, while she was delicacy itself.
"Personally, I am in no hurry to go till I have finished The Silver Cross," said Aunt Maria. "No one misses the stimulus of cultivated society more than I do, but I always feel London life, with its large demands upon one, somewhat of a strain when I am composing. And the seclusion of the country is certainly conducive to work."
It is very rare that such friendship as existed between these four boys, ever takes place between the day boys of a free school and the boarders. Although, for the honour of all parties, it must be acknowledged that a much better feeling exists on this point now than formerly, when the boarders looked upon it as decidedly infra dig to hold any communication with the town boys, and when in consequence these poor victims to a false pride, were obliged to make their escape from school with the greatest expedition.
Fortunately, both aunts had only consented, much against the grain, to live in the country on account of their sister's health; both lamented that they were cut off from congenial literary society; both frequently regretted the move.
"I think you would have a far better chance of getting well in the country than you have here. You have told me over and over again, you know, that you were sure London air was bad for you."
Mr. B. "Should you, Harry, like to leave the country, and go to live in some town?"
Harry. "Indeed, sir, I should not, for then I must leave everything I love in the world; . . . . . . . ."
T. "And have you ever been in any large town?"
H. "Once I was in Exeter, but I did not much like it. The houses seemed to me to stand too thick and close, and then there are little narrow alleys where the poor live, and the houses are so high, that neither light nor air can ever get to them; and they most of them appeared so dirty and unhealthy, that it made my heart ache to look at them. And then I walked along the streets, and peeped into the shops--and what do you think I saw?"
T. "What? "
H."Why, I saw great hulking fellows, as big as our ploughmen and carters, with their heads all frizzled and curled like one of our sheep's tails, and they did nothing but finger ribands and caps for the women! . . . . . And then, the gentlewoman at whose house I was, took me to a place, where there was a large room full of candles, and a great number of fine gentlemen and ladies all dressed out very finely, who were dancing about as if they were mad. But at the door of this house there were twenty or thirty ragged, half-starved women and children, who stood shivering in the rain, and begged for a bit of bread; but nobody gave it to them. So then I could not help thinking that it would be a great deal better, if all the fine people would give some of their money to the poor that they might have some clothes and victuals in their turn. I went home the next day, and never was I better pleased in my life. When I came to the top of the great hill, from which you have a prospect of our house, I really thought I should have cried with joy. The fields looked all so pleasant, and the cattle feeding in them so happy; . . . . . ."
When on the moss-green hill the wandering wind
Drowses, and lays his brazen trumpet down,
When snow-fed waters gurgle, cold and brown,
And wintered birds creep from the stacks to find
Solace, while each bright eye begins to see
A visionary nest in every tree--
Let us away, out of the murky day
Of sullen towns, into the silver noise
Of woods where every bud has found her way
Sunward, and every leaf has found a voice.
There was something so frank and artless in the girl's manner, something so utterly different from the self-conscious timidity and blushing stupidity of country maidens, that Christian was perfectly bewildered.
He glared at her with true country suspicion.
And now here was Roger, kindly, sociable Roger, whom he had always got on with so well,--in spite of the secret contempt of the country-bred man for a man who neither shoots not hunts.
Isabella attributed the fact to "the effects of dissipation," and laughed at her cousin for being so country-bred as to feel overwhelmed with fatigue by only one party on the same night.
"Their girl's run away. She's town-bred, and she's afraid of the winter."
Fifty-five. Tallish--but stoutish. Dressed like the country gentleman which he was not and never would be. Not by taking any amount of thought can you become a country gentleman.
'Well, I mun be going. I'm off to prentice myself for ten months to learn the coloured weaving in London Town. Then I can do piecework at home, and care nothing for Grimble and his gang. Coloured weaving brings in a tidy bit, and I'll send it by coach every few months.'
I suspect that of all the men in the world, a young English country gentleman, of good name, of good repute, of tolerable intelligence, with good health, and of innocent life, has more chance of happiness than any other. Most human cares are impossible for him; he has plenty to do, plenty to think about, and his work is all laid ready to his hand. I cannot conceive of any man of finer chances than a rich young squire--the world and its temptations seem put out of the way in his case; yet he frequently makes a fearful fiasco of it too.
In the mother's mind there were still lingering dim memories of a very different childhood, and of better times before her marriage. Sometimes there came to her as there comes to all of us, sudden flashes of light out of the misty past; and she saw again her cottage home down in the country, and the village school she went to, and her first place as a young servant in the vicarage, where the clergyman's wife had taken care she should keep up her acquaintance with the collects and the catechism. Most of the collects and nearly all the catechism had faded away from her remembrance; but many a quiet Sunday afternoon she had talked to her children of the vicarage garden, where flowers grew all the year round, and of the village green, where boys and girls could play unmolested and unnoticed; and how she left home to come to London for high wages, and had never seen it again. Then she told them of the gay and grand doings there had been in the great houses where she had been in service, until she met with their father, and gave up all the grandeur and luxury for love of him. And then her voice would falter a little as she talked to them of his death, and of all her troubles following quickly one after another, till she was thankful to have even such a home as this.
Immerson was engaged, on salary plus commission. He stopped all the Palace's newspaper advertising in London, and was running campaigns in the provinces and abroad for the inculcation of a theory that London, the world's centre, was a jolly and bright city, and for depreciating the attractions of the Riviera and other resorts. Imperial palace by Arnold Bennett. Chapter 36.
Members of Parliament, journalists, publicists, powers in the City were being regimented for the campaign. And he talked to them!
There is in Bury, a long wide street stretching from the bridge of the town considerably into the country. It is scarcely so much a street as a road, bordered with houses of many grades, for, until these railway times, it was a great thoroughfare, along which coaches and mails used to run southward. It is called the Abbey Road, for years ago, when walls and gates kept our good towns safe against hostile visitors, one of the city gates stood here, as well as the grand old Abbey, whose remains still recall a something of the day when its church vied with the proudest Cathedral in the land, and its mitred head held baronial sway, and guided the councils of the nation.
Who'll walk the fields with us to town,
In an old coat and a faded gown?
We take our roots and country sweets
Where high walls shade the steep old streets,
And golden bells and silver chimes
Ring up and down the sleepy times
If all folk lived with labour sweet
Of their own busy hands and feet,
Such marketing, it seems to me,
Would make an end of poverty.
A fair town is Shrewsbury--
The world over
You'll hardly find a fairer,
Early there come travelling
On market day
Old men and young men
From far away,
With red fruits of the orchard
And dark fruits of the hill,
Dew-fresh garden stuff
And mushrooms chill,
Honey from the brown skep,
Brown eggs, and posies
Of gillyflowers and Lent lilies
And blush roses.
Of all the valleys among the hills of England, there is none more lovely and more pleasant than the valley of Church Cloverley. It runs from north to south between the ridges of a group of mountains, over which the sun rises after a very long grey light of dawn in the morning, and sets below the opposite heights early in the evening, leaving a soft and shadowy twilight to linger fondly upon the cool slopes of the mountain-sides. Here and there the valley widens into a broader space, large enough to contain a few corn-fields or rich meadow-land, surrounded by hedgerows of hawthorn, with wide-spreading beech trees and thick-leaved sycamores. Through the whole length of the valley there stretches an old high road, once thronged with coaches and carriages; but, since the opening of the railway, so quiet and deserted that the youngest child can be trusted to play along its track, or go from cottage to cottage on busy little errands. About midway through the valley lies the village of Church Cloverley, nestling among the enclosing hills, which rise round it like sheltering walls, as if to guard it from the world, which can only creep in to disturb its peace by the two roads branching north and south, and by the by-paths over the mountains. . . . . . . . . . . . The eastern hills consist of separate and distinct elevations, standing apart, yet near to one another; but on the west there is one long range forming a large table-land at the top, with small vales and glens, beginning almost unseen in the very heart of the hills, and running steeply down into the valley, along which, both summer and winter, there fall clear little mountain brooks, rippling and singing over their rocky courses, and gleaming like lines of silver, until they reach the valley, and flow away in broad but shallow streams through the open country towards the river, whose current they help to swell.
"My child," he said, "I'm come to ask your mother to let you go to school in a pleasant place down in the country. Will she let you go?"
They came down the quaint street, by the old market, where fruit was set out so temptingly that Joe bought two enormous melons, which he carried under his arms. The street was full of country folk, interspersed with visitors who hoped to attain the peace of the countryside without its toil. Strings of hill-ponies went by, droves of bullocks, sheep with red letters on their shorn bodies.
In just the same way he drank in the beauty of the countryside, the strange, lovely shapes of trees and rocks.
Mr. Launder was an old bachelor, and had more than money enough for himself. He was a pious, simple, and humble man. He had seen many grand sights in the world, but there was none so pleasant to him as those which are found in the country.
He wore a thick loose tweed suit, not specially designed, but not wholly unsuitable, for the game of golf; with thick brown boots; and he had a rural air. Violet rose at once from her busy desk to receive him. She smiled to see him so arrayed, thinking maternally that a day in the country was just what he had needed.
And while the silver ploughshare cut into the stiff soil, his spirit drove its way into the heart of the moor and left on its stern beauty the long, shining, fruitful furrows of the imagination. He wrapped himself in the moor, and he attained a beauty he could not have won in a town.
The brown raisins were heaped upon a yellow plate, and she made a gracious picture with her two plaits of brown hair, her dark eyebrows bent above eyes of lavender-grey, and her richly tinted face with its country tan and its flush of brownish rose.
Polly had been sent into the country, and had returned looking fresh and sound, only her hand was not recovered.
This life of the rich English country gentleman would seem wonderfully beautiful. In a well-set, well-ordered, well-trained house of this kind, you get almost all the things which are supposed by ordinary people to make life valuable. To begin with, you get rules of life and conduct, in which you believe, and which are easy to follow: the following of which (such as going to church in the morning and being as respectable as another generally) gives you the prestige of being a respectable person. Next you get an entourage of accumulated beauty and accumulated tradition. No one ever knows of the accumulated art-treasures in any old country house, until a sleepy and tangle-headed housemaid burns it down. There you have enough to eat and drink; all of the best. There you have air, light, exercise. The beauty of horses, the beauty of dogs, the beauty of your grass-lands in spring and of your corn-lands in summer.
A loaf of bread is not much. To us, sheltered in our abundant homes, it seems as nothing. But, to many a one, toiling and starving in this same city of London, a loaf may be almost the turning-point between death and life.
Misery and degradation and crime lay all about Dudley as he turned homewards, and for the moment it seemed a hopeless task to endeavour to raise this dead mass of city's lowest population from its ignorance and savagery. And what if the law did not aid him! If the best of these young barbarians, yielding to his natural instincts, broke the laws he did not know, and was arrested by a Christian people, not to be wisely and gently dealt with, but to be set for evermore against society, every man's hand against him and his hand against every man, what chance was there for him and his fellow-labourers to work any deliverance?
"Then Jesus cried over London," she went on; "that was real crying, I know. He only saw the city once, and then He wept over it. I'm thinkin' of that."
"Ah! the city!" he repeated, "yes! 'He beheld the city, and wept over it.' Those are the words, Victoria?"
"Yes," she said.
"It's true of London," he continued, "as true as it ever was of any city in the world. And after Jesus had wept over it, He said, 'If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong to thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes!
And the good ladies of the town, big with stiff flowered silks and babes righteously begotten, laughed so behind their fans when they went to the prison to see a lovely harlot whipped.
Sing on, dear bird! Bring the old rapturous pain,
In this great town, where I no welcome find.
Show me the murmuring forest in your mind,
And April's fragile cups, brimful of rain.
O sing me far away, that I may hear
The voice of grass, and, weeping, may be blind
To slights and lies and friends that prove unkind.
Sing till my soul dissolves into a tear,
Glimmering within a chaliced daffodil.
So, when the stately sun with burning breath
Absorbs my being, I'll dream that he is Death,
Great Death, the undisdainful. By his will
No more unlovely, haunting all things fair,
I'll seek some kinder life in the golden air.
In a screened and secluded corner of one of the many railway-bridges which span the streets of London, there could be seen, a few years ago, from five o'clock every morning until half-past eight, a tidily set out coffee-stall, consisting of a trestle and a board, upon which stood two large tin cans, with a small fire of charcoal burning under each, so as to keep the coffee boiling during the early hours of the morning when the work-people were thronging into the city, on the way to their daily toil.
But the close air of a large manufacturing town did not agree with Susan long. Before she had left her happy, airy Bury home, twelve months, she was a shadow of her gay and blooming self, and every letter which reached Mrs. Towers from her was full of melancholy tales of sickness.
Annie was only an untaught girl from a remote farm in America, who was used to rough housework, and had little need of money; while she had talents and abilities that would distinguish her even among the elegant and accomplished circles of London society, if she only could have the fortune which would be thrown away upon her cousins.
"Be sure to take care of her, Tom," said his mother; "little Miss Bessy is not used to our rough country ways."
But, anyhow, Mr. Black was sufficiently good-looking to be called handsome in a countryside where young unmarried men were rare as water ousels.
Poor Kate was country-bred, and in youth had learned the free use of her limbs in all manner of rustic exercise; so although her mind was crushed down and darkened, her body still retained a certain strength.
He considered that if a woman believed in the propriety of the astounding country ritual of calls, she ought at least to perform it conscientiously and not insult her neighbours by negligence.
Now we must return to the marriage-feast. Every privileged man, according to the old country custom, saluted the bride; and then, by a still older custom, the groomsmen saluted the bridesmaids.
There is a curious half-superstitious, half-mystic sense in the minds of some country-folk that the dead need sympathy--perhaps almost food and drink--more in the days before burial than in their lives.
He said nothing, but stood looking down at her with such frank admiration as even a bridegroom in this countryside does not vouchsafe to his bride; and with a light in his eyes that would have been considered 'Most ondecent,' if the onlookers could have found a name for it.
Like most country girls they were prudish, somewhat in the manner of mediaeval nuns, with a very clear knowledge of life as it is and a sense that only isolation and extreme care can save them from the mêlée. Mrs. Arden's frequent allusions to her 'stummick' always made Deborah blush. And once at a cattle fair, when her mother had knowingly punched a cow in the ribs and announced with bonhomie to the owner: 'She won't be long!' Deborah had been overwhelmed with shame.
Such a wooing was different from anything she had ever dreamed of. Where were the conventions of the countryside, the 'walking-out,' the gradual intimacy, the slow ritual of embraces?
Marigold raised her head, and out of the confusion and terror looked proud, the simple pride of a country girl to whom her good name is all.
It was a thing he had never done--to keep back a letter. He had the translucent honesty of the majority of country people who work for their bread, and he had a sense of responsibility.
But she had the native courtesy which is in most country people, however rough they may be.
At the inn by the ford, with the reins over his arm, stood Elmer, in the countryman's attitude of tireless patience.
Two very strong and dirty hands met in a grip that neither noticed particularly, though it would have made a townsman shout.
Mr. Dugdale was walking up and down Kingcombe railway station, waiting for the early train. One or two sleepy porters were eyeing him with a sort of pitying curiosity, for ill news spreads fast in a country neighbourhood.
Nor was there any distinction in their zealous labour. Perhaps the young lady was a little the most energetic, but the country girls were more strongly built and did the most work.
"I'll do it," he said, after a long silence, "not just round here, you know, mother; but out in the country, where folks ain't all in such a hurry.
Visit the introductory page giving authors and further reading.
Page created 28 November 2002 and last
updated 24 January 2003
For your literary enquiries and comments please see the Who to contact page.
Please read the general terms and conditions and about accessibility on this site, including the use of the UK government accesskeys system. Further details on ICRA labelling, visitor counts and EnrichUK may be obtained by following these external links:-
|
|