Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books Part 25

I have been into the poor old Camp. I will tell thee. Did you ever meet Mr. F., R.E.? a young engineer of H.'s standing, and his chief friend. A Lav-engro (Russian is his present study) with a nice taste in old bra.s.s pots and Eastern rugs, and a choice little book-case, and a terrier named "Jem "--the exact image of dear old "Rough." He asked us to go to tea to see the pictures you and I gave to the Mess and so forth. So the General let us have the carriage and pair and away we went. It _is_ the divinest air! It was like pa.s.sing quickly through BALM of body and mind. And you know how the birds sing, and how the young trees look among the pines, and the milkmaids in the meadows, and the kingcups in the ditches, and then the North Camp and the dust, and Sir Evelyn Wood's old quarters with a new gate, and then the racecourse with polo going on and more dust!--and then the R.E.

theatre (where n.o.body has now the spirit to get up any theatricals!), and the "Kennel" (as Jane Turton called it) where I used to get flags and rushes, and where Trouve, dear Trouve! will never swim again! And then the Iron Church from which I used to _run_ backwards and forwards not to be late for dinner every evening, with the "tin" roof that used to shake to the "Tug of War Hymn,"--and then more dust, and (it must be confessed) dirt and squalor, and _back views_ of ashpit and mess-kitchens and wash-houses, and turf wall the gra.s.s won't grow on, and rustic work always breaking up! and so on into the R.E. Lines! Mr.

F. was not quite ready for us, so we drove on a little and looked at No. 3. N. Lines. T.'s hut is nearly buried in creepers now. An _Isle of Man_(do you remember?) official lives there, they say; but it looked as if only the Sleeping Beauty could. Our hut looks just the same. Cole's greenhouse in good repair. But through all the glamour of love one could see that there _is_ a good deal of dirt and dust, and refuse and coal-boxes!!!

Then a bugle played!--

"The trumpet blew!"

I _think_ it was "Oh come to the Orderly Room!" _We_ went to the Mess. The Dining-Room is much improved by a big window, high pitched, opposite the conservatory. It is new papered, prettily, and our pictures hang on each side of the fireplace. Mr. G. joined us and we went into the Ante-Room. Then to the inevitable photo books, in the window where poor old Y. used to sit in his spotless mufti. When G.

(who is not _spirituel_) said, turning over leaves for the young ladies, "that and that are killed" I turned so sick! Mac G. and Mac D.! Oh dear! There be many ghosts in "old familiar places." But I have no devouter superst.i.tion than that the souls of women who die in childbed and men who fall in battle go straight to Paradise!!!

Requiescant in Pace.

Then to tea in Mr. F.'s quarters next to the men. Then--now mark you, how the fates managed so happy a coincidence--G. said casually, "I saw Mrs. Jelf in the Lines just now!" I nearly jumped out of my boots, for I did not know she had got to England. Then F. had helped to nurse Jelf in Cyprus and was of course interested to see her, so out went G.

for Mrs. J., and anon, through the hut porch in she came--Tableau--!

Then I sent the girls with Messrs F. and G. to "go round the stables,"

and M. and _Jem_ and I remained together. Jem went to sleep (with one eye open) under the table, and the sun shone and made the roof very hot, and outside--"The trumpets blew!"

It was an afternoon wonderfully like a Wagner opera, thickset with recurring _motifs_....

_Frimhurst._ June 15, 1891.

The old editions of d.i.c.kens are here, and I have been re-reading _Little Dorrit_ with keen enjoyment. There is a great deal of poor stuff in it, but there is more that is first-rate than I thought. I had quite forgotten Flora's enumeration of the number of times Mr. F.

proposed to her--"seven times, once in a hackney coach, once in a boat, once in a pew, once on a donkey at Tunbridge Wells, and the rest on his knees." But she is very admirable throughout.

I've also been reading some more of that American novelist's work, Henry James, junior,--_The Madonna of the Future_, etc. He is not _great_, but very clever.

Used you not to like the first-cla.s.s Americans you met in China very much? It is with great reluctance--believing Great Britons to be the salt of the earth!!--but a lot of evidence of sorts is gradually drawing me towards a notion that the best type of American Gentleman is something like a generation ahead of our gentlemen in his att.i.tude towards women and all that concerns them. There are certain points of view commonly taken up by Englishmen, even superior ones, which always exasperate women, and which seem equally incomprehensible by American men. You will guess the sort of things I mean. I do not know whether it is more really than the _elite_ of Yankees (in which case we also have our _ames d'elite_ in chivalry)--but I fancy as a race they seem to be shaking off the ground-work idea of woman as the lawful PREY of man, who must keep Mrs. Grundy at her elbow, and _show cause why she shouldn't be insulted_. (An almost exclusively _English_ feeling even in Great Britain, I fancy. By the bye, what odd flash of self-knowledge of John Bull made Byron say in his will that his daughter was not to marry an Englishman, as either Scotch or Irishmen made better husbands?)...

July 6, 1881.

The Academy this year is very fine. Some truly beautiful things. But before one picture I stood and simply laughed and shook with laughing aloud. It is by an Italian, and called "A frightful state of things."

It is a baby left in a high chair in a sort of Highland cottage, with his plate of "parritch" on his lap--and every beastie about the place, geese, c.o.c.ks, hens, chicks, dogs, cats, etc., etc., have invaded him, and are trying to get some of his food. The painting is exquisite, and it is the most indescribably funny thing you can picture: and so like dear Hector, with one paw on little Mistress's eye eating her breakfast!!!...

_Ecclesfield._ August 24, 1881.

... Andre has made the "rough-book" (water colours) of "A week spent in a Gla.s.s Pond, By the Great Water Beetle." I only had it a few hours, but I scrambled a bit of the t.i.tle-page on to the enclosed sheet of green paper for you to see. It is entirely in colours. The name of the tale is beautifully done in letters, the initials of which _bud and blossom_ into the Frogbit (which s.h.i.+nes in white ma.s.ses on the Aldershot Ca.n.a.l!) [_Sketch._] To the left the "Water Soldier"

(_Stratiotes Aloides_) with its white blossoms. At the foot of the page "the Great Water Beetle" himself, writing his name in the book--_Dyticus Marginalis_. There is another blank page at the beginning of the book, where the beetle is standing blacking himself in a penny ink-pot!!!! and another where he is just turning the leaves of a book with his antennae--the book containing the name of the chromolithographers. He has adopted almost all my ideas, and I told him (though it is not in the tale) "I should like a _dog_ to be with the children in all the pictures, and a cat to be with the old naturalist,"--and he has such a dog (a white bull terrier) [_sketch_], who waits on the woodland path for them in one picture, _noofles_ in the colander at the water-beasts in another, examines the beetle in a third, stands on his hind legs to peep into the aquarium in a fourth, etc. But I cannot describe it all to you. I have asked to have it again by and by, and will send you a coloured sketch or two from it. I am so much pleased!... Perhaps the best part of the book is _the cover_. It is very beautiful. The Bell Gla.s.s Aquarium (lights in the water beautifully done) carries the t.i.tle, and reeds, flowers, newts, beetles, dragon-flies, etc., etc., are grouped with wondrous fancy!

This entirely his own design....

_Jesmond Dene, Newcastle-on-Tyne._ August 30, 1881.

The four Jones children and their nurse are in lodgings at a place called Whitley on the coast, not far from here. Somebody from here goes to see them most days. To-day Mrs. J. and I went. As we were starting dear "Bob" (the collie who used to belong to the Younghusbands) was determined to go. Mrs. Jones said No. He bolted into the cab and crouched among my petticoats; I begged for him, and he was allowed. At the station he was in such haste he _would_ jump into a 2nd cla.s.s carriage, and we had hard work to get him out. (This _is_ rather funny, because she usually goes there 2nd cla.s.s with the children: and he looked at the 1st and would hardly be persuaded to get in.) Well, the coast is rather like Filey, and such a wind was blowing, and _such_ white horses foamed and fretted, and sent up wildly tossed fountains of foam against the rocks, and such grey and white waves swallowed up the sands! I ran and played with the children and the dog--and built a big sand castle ("Early English if not Delia Cruscan"!!), and by good-luck and much sharp hunting among the storm-wrack flung ash.o.r.e among the foam, found four cork floats, and made the children four s.h.i.+ps with paper sails, and had a glorious dose of oxygen and iodine. How strange are the properties of the invisible air! The air from an open window at Ecclesfield gives me neuralgia, and doubly so at Exeter. To-day the wild wind was driving huge tracts of foam across the sands in ma.s.ses that broke up as they flew, and driving the sand itself after them like a dust-storm. I could barely stand on the slippery rocks, and yet my teeth seemed to _settle in my jaws_ and my face to get PICKLED (!) and comforted by the wild (and very cold) blast.... Now to sweet repose, but I was obliged to tell you I had been within sound of the sea, aye! and run into and away from the waves, with children and a dog. This is better than a Bath Chair in Brompton Cemetery!...

_Thornliebank, Glasgow._ September 8, 1881.

... "It is good to be sib to" kindly Scots! and I am having a very pleasant visit. You know the place and its luxuries and hospitalities well.

I came from Newcastle last Friday, and (in a good hour, etc.) bore more in the travelling way than I have managed with impunity since I broke down. I came by the late express, got to Glasgow between 8 and 9 p.m., and had rather a hustle to to get a cab, etc. A nice old porter (as dirty and hairy as a Simian!) secured one at last with a cabby who jabbered in a tongue that at last I utterly lost the running of, and when he suddenly (and as it appeared indignantly!) remounted his box, whipped up, and drove off, leaving me and my boxes, I felt inclined to cry(!), and said piteously to the porter, "What _does_ he say? I _cannot_ understand him!" On which the old Ourang-Outang began to pat me on the shoulder with his paw, and explain loudly and slowly to my Sa.s.senach ears, "He's jest telling ye--that 't'll be the better forrr ye--y'unnerstan'--to hev a caaaab that's got an i(ro)n railing on the top of it--for the sake of yourrr boxes." And in due time I was handed over to a cab with an iron railing, the Simian left me, and so friendly a young cabby (also dirty) took me in hand that I began to think he was drunk, but soon found that he was only exceedingly kind and lengthily conversational! When he had settled the boxes, put on his coat, argued out the Crums' family and their residences, first with me and then with his friends on the platform, we were just off when a thought seemed to strike him, and back he came to the open window, and saying "Ye'll be the better of havin' this ap"--scratched it up from the outside with nails like Nebuchadnezzar's. Whether my face looked as if I did not like it or what, I don't know, but down came the window again with a rattle, and he wagged the leather strap almost in my face and said, "there's _hoals_ in't, an' ye can jest let it down to yer own satisfaction if ye fin' it gets clos." Then he rattled it up again, mounted the box, and off we went. Oh, _such_ a jolting drive of six miles! Such wrenching over tramway lines! But I had my fine air-cus.h.i.+ons, and my spine must simply be another thing to what it was six months back. Oh, he was funny! I found that he did NOT know the way to Thornliebank, but having a general idea, and a (no doubt just) faith in his own powers, he swore he did know, and utterly resented asking bystanders. After we got far away from houses, on the bleak roads in the dark night, I merely felt one must take what came. By and by he turned round and began to retrace his steps. I put out my head (as I did at intervals to his great disgust; he always pitched well into me--"We're aal right--just com--pose yeself," etc.), but he a.s.sured me he'd only just gone by the gate. So by and by we drew up, no lights in the lodge, no answer to shouts--then he got down, and in the darkness I heard the gates grating as if they had not been opened for a century. Then under overhanging trees, and at last in the dim light I saw that the walls were broken down and weeds were thick round our wheels. I could bear it no longer, and put out my head again, and I shall never forget the sight. The moon was coming a little bit from behind the clouds, and showed a court-yard in which we had pulled up, surrounded with buildings in ruins, and overgrown with nettles and rank gra.s.s. We had not seen a human being since we left Glasgow, at least an hour before,--and of all the places to have one's throat cut in!! The situation was so tight a place, it really gave one the courage of desperation, and I ordered him to drive away at once. I believe he was half frightened himself, and the horse ditto, and never, never was I in anything so nearly turned over as that cab! for the horse got it up a bank. At last it was righted, but not an inch would my Scotchman budge till he'd put himself through the window and confounded himself in apologies, and in explanations calculated to convince me that, in spite of appearances, he knew the way to Thornliebank "pairf.e.c.kly well." "Noo, I do beg of ye not to be narrrr-vous. Do NOT give way to't. Ye may trust me entirely. Don't be discommodded in the least. I'm just pairfectly acquainted with the road.

But it'll be havin' been there in the winter that's just misled me. But we're aal right." And all right he did eventually land me here! so late J. had nearly given me up.

TO MRS. ELDER.

_Greno House, Grenoside, Sheffield._ October 26, 1881.

DEAREST AUNT HORATIA,

D. says you would like some of the excellent Scotch stories I heard from Mr. Donald Campbell. I wish I could take the wings of a swallow and tell you them. You must supply gaps from your imagination.

They were as odd a lot of tales as I ever heard--_drawled_ (oh so admirably drawled, without the flutter of an eyelid, or the quiver of a muscle) by a Lowland Scotchman, and queerly characteristic of the Lowland Scotch race!!!! Picture this slow phlegmatic rendering to your "mind's eye, Horatia!"

A certain excellent woman after a long illness--departed this life, and the Minister went to condole with the Widower. "The Hand of affliction has been heavy on yu, Donald. Ye've had a sair loss in your Jessie."

"Aye--aye--I've had a sair loss in my Jessie--an' a heavy ex-pense."

A good woman lost her husband, and the Minister made his way to the court where she lived. He found her playing cards with a friend. But she was _aequus ad occasionem_--as Charlie says!--

"Come awa', Minister! Come awa' in wi' ye. Ye'll see _I'm just hae-ing a trick with the cairds to ding puir Davie oot o' my heid_."

I don't know if the following will _read_ comprehensibly. _Told_ it was overwhelming, and was a prime favourite with the Scotch audience.