An American Girl in London

XXV

MR. MAFFERTON frequently expressed his regret that almost immediately after my arrival in London – in fact, during the time of my disappearance from the Métropole, and just as he became aware of my being with Lady Torquilin – his mother and two sisters bad been obliged to go to the Riviera on account of one of the Misses Mafferton's health. One afternoon – the day before they left, I believe – Lady Torquilin and I, coming in, found a large assortment of cards belonging to the family, which were to be divided between us, apparently. But, as Mr. Charles Mafferton was the only one of them left in town, my acquaintance with the Maffertons had made very little progress, except, of course, with the portly old cousin I have mentioned before, who was a lord, and who stayed in London through the entire session of Parliament. This cousin and I became so well acquainted, in spite of his being a lord, that we used to ask each other conundrums. 'What do they call a black cat in London?' was a favourite one of his. But I had the advantage of Lord Mafferton here, for he always forgot that he had asked the same conundrum the last time we met, and thought me tremendously clever when I answered, 'Puss, puss!' But, as I have said before, there were very few particulars in which this nobleman gratified my inherited idea of what a lord ought to be.

One of the Misses Mafferton – the one who enjoyed good health – had very kindly taken the trouble to write to me from the Riviera a nice friendly letter, saying how sorry they all were that we did not meet before they left Town, and asking me to make them a visit as soon as they returned in June. The letter went on to say that they had shared their brother's anxiety about me for some time, but felt quite comfortable in the thought of leaving me so happily situated with Lady Torquilin, an old friend of their own, and was it not singular? Miss Mafferton exclaimed, in her pointed handwriting, signing herself mine ever affectionately, E. F. Mafferton. I thought it was certainly singularly nice of her to write to me like that, a perfect stranger; and while I composed an answer in the most cordial terms I could, I thought of all I had heard about the hearty hospitality of the English – 'when once you know them.'

When I told Mr. Mafferton I had heard from his sister, and how much pleasure the letter had given me, he blushed in the most violent and unaccountable manner, but seemed pleased nevertheless. It was odd to see Mr. Mafferton discomposed, and it discomposed me. I could not in the least understand why his sister's politeness to a friend of his should embarrass Mr. Mafferton, and was glad when he said he had no doubt Eleanor and I would be great friends, and changed the subject. But it was about this time that another invitation from relatives of Mr. Mafferton's living in Berkshire gave me my one always-to-be-remembered experience of the country in England. Lady Torquilin was invited too, but the invitation was for a Tuesday and Wednesday particularly full of engagements for her.

'Couldn't we write and say we'd rather come next week?' I suggested.

Lady Torquilin looked severely horrified. 'I should think not!' she replied. 'You're not in America, child. I hardly know these people at all; moreover, it's you they want to see, and not me in the least. So I'll just send my apologies, and tell Mrs. Stacy you're an able-bodied young woman who gets about wonderfully by herself, and that she may expect you by the train she proposes – and see that you don't outstay your invitation, young lady, or I shall be in a fidget!' And Lady Torquilin gave me her cheek to kiss, and went away and wrote to Mrs. Stacy as she had said.

An hour or two beyond London the parallel tracks of the main line stretched away in the wrong direction for me, and my train sped down them, leaving me for a few minutes undecided how to proceed. The little station seemed to have nothing whatever to do with anything but the main line. It sat there in the sun and cultivated its flower-beds, and waited for the big trains to come thundering by, and had no concern but that. Presently, however, I observed, standing all by itself beside a row of tulips under a clay bank on the other side of the bridge, the most diminutive thing in railway transport I had ever seen. It was quite complete, engine and cab, and luggage-van and all, with its passenger accommodation properly divided into first, second, and third class, and it stood there placidly, apparently waiting for somebody. And I followed my luggage over the bridge with the quiet conviction that this was the train for Pinbury, and that it was waiting for me.

There was nobody else. And after the porter had stowed my effects carefully away in the van he also departed, leaving the Pinbury train in my charge. I sat in it for a while and admired the tulips, and wondered how soon it would rain, and fixed my veil, and looked over the 'Daily Graphic' again, but nothing happened. It occurred to me that possibly the little Pinbury train had been forgotten, and I got out. There was no one on the platform, but just outside the station I saw a rusty old coachman seated on the box of an open landau, so I spoke to him. 'Does that train go to Pinbury?'I asked. He said it did. 'Does it go to-day?' I inquired further. He looked amused at my ignorance. 'Oh yes, lady,' he replied; 'she goes every day – twice. But she 'as to wait for two hup trains yet. She'll be hoff in about 'alf an hour now!' – this reassuringly.

When we did start it took us exactly six minutes to get to Pinbury, and I was sorry I had not tipped the engine-driver and got him to run down with me and back again while he was waiting. Whatever they may say to the contrary, there are few things in England that please Americans more than the omnipotence of the tip.

Two of the Stacy young ladies met me on the Pinbury platform, and gave me quite the most charming welcome I have had in England. With the exception of Peter Corke – and Peter would be exceptional anywhere – I had nearly always failed to reach any sympathetic relation with the young ladies I had come in contact with in London. Perhaps this was because I did not see any of them very often or very long together, and seldom without the presence of some middle-aged lady who controlled the conversation; but the occasions of my meeting with the London girl had never sufficed to overcome the natural curiosity with which she usually regarded me. I rejoiced when I saw that it would be different with Miss Stacy and Miss Dorothy Stacy, and probably with the other Misses Stacy at home. They regarded me with outspoken interest, but not at all with fear. They were very polite, but their politeness was of the gay, unconscious sort, which only impresses you when you think of it afterwards. Delightfully pretty, though lacking that supreme inertia of expression that struck me so often as the finishing touch upon London beauty, and gracefully tall, without that impressiveness of development I had observed in town, Miss Dorothy Stacy's personality gave me quite a new pleasure. It was invested in round pink cheeks and clear grey eyes, among other things that made it most agreeable to look at her; and yellow hair that went rippling down her back; and the perfect freshness and unconsciousness of her beauty, with her height and her gentle muscularity, reminded one of an immature goddess of Olympia, if such a person could be imagined growing up. Miss Dorothy Stacy was sixteen past, and in a later moment of confidence she told me that she lived in dread of being obliged to turn up her hair and wear irretrievably long 'frocks.' I found this unreasonable, but charming. In America all joys are grown up, and the brief period of pinafores is one of probation.

We drove away in a little brown dogcart behind a little brown pony into the English country, talking a great deal. Miss Stacy drove, and I sat beside her, while Miss Dorothy Stacy occupied the seat in the rear when she was not alighting in the middle of the road to pick up the Pinbury commissions, which did not travel well, or the pony's foot, to see if he had a stone in it. The pony objected with mild viciousness to having his foot picked up; but Miss Dorothy did not take his views into account at all; up came the foot and out came the stone. The average American girl would have driven helplessly along until she overtook a man, I think.

I never saw a finer quality of mercy anywhere than the Stacy young ladies exhibited toward their beast. When we came to a rising bit of road Miss Dorothy invariably leaped down and walked as well as the pony, to save him fatigue; when a slight declivity presented itself he walked again solemnly to the bottom, occasionally being led. He expected this attention always at such times, pausing at the top and looking round for it, and when it was withheld his hind-quarters assumed an aggrieved air of irresponsibility. When Miss Stacy wished to increase his rate of going by a decimal point, she flicked him gently, selecting a spot where communication might be made with his brain at least inconvenience to himself; but she never did anything that would really interfere with his enjoyment of the drive.

Of course, Miss Stacy wanted to know what I thought of England in a large general way, but before I had time to do more than mention a few heads under which I had gathered my impressions she particularised with reference to the scenery. Miss Stacy asked me what I thought of English scenery, with a sweet and ladylike confidence, including most of what we were driving through, with a graceful flourish of her whip. She said I might as well confess that we hadn't such nice scenery in America. 'Grander, you know – more mountains and lakes and things,' said Miss Stacy, 'but not really so nice, now, have you?' No, I said; unfortunately it was about the only thing we couldn't manage to take back with us; at which Miss Stacy astonished; me with the fact that she knew I was going to be a treat to her – so original – and I must be simply craving my tea, and it was good of me to come, and flicked the pony severely, so that he trotted for almost half a mile without a pause.

But we returned to the scenery, for I did not wish to be thought unappreciative, and the Misses Stacy were good enough to be interested in the points that I found particularly novel and pleasing – the flowering hedges that leaned up against the fields by the wayside, and the quantities of little birds that chirruped in and out of them, and the trees, all twisted round with ivy, and especially the rabbits, that bobbed about in the meadows and turned up their little white tails with as much naivete as if the world were a kitchen-garden closed to the public. The 'bunnies,' as Miss Dorothy Stacy called them, were a source of continual delight to me. I could never refrain from exclaiming, 'There's another!' much to the young ladies' amusement. 'You see,' explained Miss Dorothy in apology, 'they're not new to us, the dear sweet things! One might say one has been brought up with them, one knows all their little ways. But they are loves, and it is nice of you to like them.'

The pony stopped altogether on one little rise, as if he were accustomed to it, to allow us to take a side-look across the grey-green fields to where they lost themselves in the blue distance, in an effort to climb. It was a lovely landscape, full of pleasant thoughts, ideally still and gently conscious. There was the glint of a river in it, white in the sun, with twisting lines of round-headed willows marking which way it went; and other trees in groups and rows threw soft shadows across the contented fields. These trees never blocked the view; one could always see over and beyond them into other peaceful stretches, with other clumps and lines, greyer and smaller as they neared the line where the low, blue sky thickened softly into clouds and came closer down. An occasional spire, here and there a farmhouse, queer, old-fashioned hayricks gossiping in the corners of the fields, cows, horses, crows. All as if it had been painted by a tenderly conscientious artist, who economised his carmines and allowed himself no caprices except in the tattered hedge, full of May, in the foreground; all as if Nature-had understood a woman's chief duty to be tidy and delectable, except for this ragged hem of her embroidered petticoat. I dare say it would not seem so to you; but the country as I had known it in America had been an expanse of glowing colour, diversified by a striking pattern of snake-fences, relieved by woods that nobody had ever planted, and adorned by the bare, commanding brick residences of the agricultural population. Consequently, delightful as I found this glimpse of English scenery, I could not combat the idea that it had all been carefully and beautifully made, and was usually kept under cottonwool. You would understand this if you knew the important part played in our rural districts by the American stump.

'Isn't it lovely?' asked Miss Stacy, with enthusiasm. Two cows in the middle distance suddenly disappeared behind a hayrick, and for a moment the values of the landscape became confused. Still, I was able to say that it was lovely, and so neat – which opinion I was obliged to explain to Miss Stacy, as I have to you, while the brown pony took us thoughtfully on.

XXVI

I DROVE in at the gates of Hallington House as one might drive into the scene of a dear old dream – a dream that one has half-believed and half-doubted, and wholly loved, and dreamed again all one's life long. There it stood, as I had always wondered if I might not see it standing in that far day when I should go to England, behind its high brick wall, in the midst of its ivies and laburnums and elms and laurel-bushes, looking across where its lawns dipped into its river at soft green meadows sloping to the west – a plain old solid grey stone English country-house so long occupied with the birthdays of other people that it had quite forgotten its own. Very big and very solid, without any pretentiousness of Mansard roof, or bow window, or balcony, or verandah its simple story of strength and shelter and home and hospitality was plain to me between its wide-open gates and its wide-open doors, and I loved it from that moment.

It was the same all through – the Stacys realised the England of my imagination to me most sweetly and completely; I found that there had been no mistake. Mrs. Stacy realised it, pretty and fresh and fair at fifty, plump and motherly in her black cashmere and lace, full of pleasant greetings and responsible inquiries. So did the Squire, coming out of his study to ask, with courteous old-fashioned solicitude, how I had borne the fatigue of the journey – such a delightful old Squire, left over by accident from the last century, with his high-bred phraseology and simple dignity and great friendliness. So did the rest of the Stacy daughters, clustering round their parents and their guest and the teapot, talking gaily with their rounded English accent of all manner of things – the South Kensington Museum, the Pinbury commissions, the prospects for tennis. Presently I found myself taken through just such narrow corridors and down just such unexpected steps as I would have hoped for, to my room, and left there. I remember how a soft wind came puffing in at the little low, tiny-paned window flung back on its hinges, swelling out the muslin curtains and bringing with it the sweetest sound I heard in England – a cry that was quite new and strange, and yet came into me from the quiet hedges of the nestling world outside, as I sat there bewitched by it, with a plaintive familiarity – 'Cuckoo!'… 'Cuckoo!' I must have heard it and loved it years ago, when the Wicks lived in England, through the ears of my ancestors. Then I discovered that the room was full of a dainty scent that I had not known before, and traced it to multitudinous little round flower-bunches, palest yellow and palest green, that stood about in everything that would hold them – fresh and pure and delicious, all the tender soul of the spring in them, all the fairness of the meadows and the love of the shy English sun. Ah, the charm of it! It is almost worth while being brought up in Chicago to come fresh to cuckoos and cowslips, and learn their sweet meaning when you are grown up and can understand it. I mean, of course, entirely apart from the inestimable advantages of a Republican form of Government, female emancipation, and the climate of Illinois. We have no cowslips in Chicago, and no cuckoos; and the cable cars do not seem altogether to make up for them. I couldn't help wishing, as I leaned through my low little window into the fragrant peace outside, that Nature had taken a little more time with America.

'Cuckoo!' from the hedge again! I could not go till the answer came from the toppling elm-boughs in the field corner, 'Cuckoo!' And in another minute, if I listened, I should hear it again.

Down below, in the meantime, out came two tidy little maids in cap and apron, and began to weed and to potter about two tidy little plots – their own little gardens anybody might know by the solicitude and the comparisons they indulged in – the freedom, too, with which they pulled what pleased themselves. It was pretty to see the little maids, and I fell to conjecturing such a scene in connection with the domestic duchess of Chicago, but without success. Her local interest could never be sufficiently depended upon, for one thing. Marguerite might plant, and Irene might water, but Arabella Maud would certainly gather the fruits of their labour, if she kept her place long enough. And I doubt if the social duties of any of these ladies would leave them time for such idylls.

'Cuckoo!' The bird caught it from the piping of the very first lover's very first love-dream. How well he must have listened!.. 'Cuckoo!'

I bade Miss Dorothy Stacy come in when I heard her knock and voice; and she seemed to bring with her, in her innocent strength and youth and pinkness, a very fair and harmonious counterpart of the cowslips and the cuckoos. She came to know if I wasn't coming down to tea. 'Listen!' I said, as the sweet cry came again. 'I was waiting till he had finished.' It was better than no excuse at all.

'I think I can show you from here where I suspect they have stolen a nest, lazy things!' answered Miss Dorothy, sympathetically, and she slipped her arm round my waist as we looked out of the window together in the suspected direction. 'Then you don't find them tiresome? Some people do, you know.' 'No,' I said, 'I don't,' And then Miss Dorothy confided to me that she was very glad; 'for, you know,' she said, I one can't like people who find cuckoos tiresome,' and we concluded that we really must go down to tea. At that point, however, I was obliged to ask Miss Dorothy to wait until I did a little towards improving my appearance. I had quite forgotten, between the cuckoos and the cowslips, that I had come up principally to wash my face.

'You met our cousin on the ship crossing the Atlantic, didn't you?' the third Miss Stacy remarked, enthusiastically, over the teapot. 'How delightfully romantic to make a – a friend – a friend like that, I mean, on a ship in the middle of the ocean! Didn't you always feel perfectly comfortable afterwards, as if, no matter what happened, he would be sure to save you?'

'Kitty!' said Mrs. Stacy from the sofa, in a tone of helpless rebuke. 'Mother, darling!' said Kitty, 'I do beg your pardon! Your daughter always speaks first and thinks afterwards, doesn't she, sweetest mother! But you must have had that feeling,' Miss Stacy continued to me; 'I know you had!'

'Oh, no!' I returned. It was rather an awkward situation

– I had no wish to disparage Miss Stacy's cousin's heroism, which, nevertheless, I had not relied upon in the least. 'I don't think I thought about being drowned,' I said.

'That proves it!' she cried in triumph. 'Your confidence was so perfect that it was unconscious! Sweetest mother – there, I won't say another word; not another syllable, mother mine, shall pass your daughter's lips! But one does like to show one's self in the right, doesn't one, Miss Wick?' – and Mrs. Stacy surrendered to an impulsive volume of embraces which descended from behind the sofa, chiefly upon the back of her neck.

How pleasant it was, that five o'clock tea-drinking in the old-fashioned drawing-room, with the jessamine nodding in at the window and all the family cats gathered upon the hearthrug – five in number, with one kitten. The Stacy's compromise in the perpetually-recurring problem of new kittens was to keep only the representative of a single generation for family affection and drawing-room privileges. The rest were obscurely brought up in the stables and located as early as was entirely humane with respectable cottagers, or darkly spoken of as 'kitchen cats.' There had been only one break in the line of posterity that gravely licked itself on the rug, or besought small favours rubbingly with purrs – made by a certain Satanella, who ate her kittens! and suffered banishment in consequence. But this was confided to me in undertones by the second Miss Stacy, who begged me not to mention the matter to Dorothy. 'We don't talk about it often, for Satanella was her cat, you know, and she can't get over her behaving so dreadfully.' Each cat had its individual history, and to the great-great-grandmother of them attached the thrilling tale, if I remember rightly, of having once only escaped hanging by her own muscular endurance and activity; but none bore so dark a blot as covered the memory of Satanella. Perhaps it is partly owing to my own fondness for pussies, but ever since I made the acquaintance of the Stacys I must confess to disparaging a family with no cats in it.

It was naturally Dorothy who took me out to see the garden – sweet, shy Dorothy, who seemed so completely to have grown in a garden that Lady Torquilin, when she brought her pink cheeks afterwards to gladden the flat in Cadogan Mansions, dubbed her 'the Wild Rose' at once. At any rate, Dorothy had always lived just here beside her garden, and never anywhere else, for she told me so in explaining her affection for it. I thought of the number of times we had moved in Chicago, and sighed.

It was not a very methodical garden, Dorothy remarked in apology – the dear sweet things mostly came up of their own accord year after year, and the only ambition Peter entertained towards it was to keep it reasonably weeded. A turn in the walk disclosed Peter at the moment with a wheelbarrow – the factotum of garden and stable, a solemn bumpkin of twenty, with a large red face and a demeanour of extreme lethargy. His countenance broke into something like a deferential grin as he passed us. 'Can you make him understand?' I asked Miss Dorothy. 'Oh, I should think so!' she replied. 'He is very intelligent!' From his appearance I should not have said so. There was nothing 'sharp,' as we say in America, about Peter, though afterwards I beard him whistling 'Two lovely black eyes' with a volume of vigorous expression that made one charge him with private paradoxical sweethearting. But I was new to the human product after many generations of the fields and hedges.

It was a square garden, shut in from the road and the neighbours by that high old red-brick wall. A tennis-court lay in the middle in the sun; the house broke into a warmly-tinted gable, red-roofed and plastered and quaint, that nestled over the little maids in the larder, I think, at one end; a tall elm and a spreading horse-chestnut helped the laurestinus bushes to shut it in from the lawns and the drive and any eyes that might not fall upon it tenderly. We sat down upon the garden-seat that somebody had built round the elm, Dorothy and I, and I looked at the garden as one turns the pages of an old storybook. There were the daisies in the grass, to begin with, all over, by hundreds and thousands, turning their bright little white-and-yellow faces up at me and saying something – I don't know quite what. I should have had to listen a long time to be sure it was anything but 'Don't step on me!' but I had a vague feeling that every now and then one said, 'Can't you remember?' Dorothy remarked it was really disgraceful, so many of them, and Peter should certainly mow them all down in the morning – by which her pretty lips gave me a keen pang. 'Oh!' I said, I what a pity!' 'Yes,' she said, relentingly, 'they are dear things, but they're very untidy. The worst of Peter is,' she went on, with a shade of reflection, 'that we are obliged to keep at him.'

I dare say you don't think much of daisies in the grass – you have always had so many. You should have been brought up on dandelions instead – in Chicago!

Then there were all the sweet spring English flowers growing in little companies under the warm brick wall – violets and pansies and yellow daffodils, and in one corner a tall, brave array of anemones, red and purple and white. And against the wall rose-bushes and an ancient fig-tree; and farther on, all massed and tangled in its own dark-green shadows, the ivy, pouring out its abundant heart to drape and soften the other angle, and catch the golden rain of the laburnum that hung over. And this English Dorothy, with her yellow hair and young-eyed innocence, the essence and the flower of it all.

Near the stables, in our roundabout ramble to the kitchen-garden, Dorothy showed me, with seriousness, a secluded corner, holding two small mounds and two small wooden tablets. On one the head of a spaniel was carved painstakingly and painted, with the inscription, 'Here Lies a Friend.' The second tablet had no bas-relief and a briefer legend: 'Here Lies Another.' 'Jack,' said she, with a shade of retrospection, and Jingo. Jack died in – let me see – eighteen eighty-five. Jingo two years later, in eighteen eighty-seven. I didn't do Jingo's picture,' Miss Dorothy went on, pensively. 'It wasn't really necessary, they were so very much alike.'

About the kitchen-garden I remember only how rampant the gooseberry-bushes were, how portentous the cabbages, and how the whole Vegetable Kingdom combined failed to keep out a trailing company of early pink roses that had wandered in from politer regions to watch the last of the sunset across the river and beyond the fields.

'I have a letter to send,' said Miss Dorothy, 'and as we go to the post-office you shall see Hallington.' So we went through the gates that closed upon this dear inner world into the winding road. It led us past 'The Green Lion,' amiably couchant upon a creaking sign that swung from a yellow cottage, past a cluster of little houses with great brooding roofs of straw, past the village school, in a somewhat bigger cottage, in one end whereof the schoolmistress dwelt and looked out upon her lavender and rue, to the post-office at the top of the hill, where the little woman inside, in a round frilled cap and spectacles, and her shawl pinned tidily across her breast, sold buttons and thread, and 'sweeties' and ginger ale, and other things. My eye lighted with surprise upon a row of very familiar wedgeshaped tins, all blue and red. They contained corned beef, and they came from Chicago. 'I know the gentleman who puts those up very well,' I said to Miss Dorothy Stacy; 'Mr. W. P. Hitt, of Chicago. He is a great friend of poppa's. 'Really!' said she, with slight embarrassment. 'Does he – does he do it himself? How clever of him!'

On the way back through the village of Hallington we met several stolid little girls by ones and twos and threes, and every little girl, as we approached, suddenly lowered her person and her petticoats by about six inches and brought it up again in a perfectly straight line, and without any change of expression whatever. It seemed to me a singular and most amusing demonstration, and Miss Dorothy explained that it was a curtsey – a very proper mark of respect. 'But surely,' she said, 'your little cottager girls in America curtsey to the ladies and gentlemen they meet!' And Miss Dorothy found it difficult to understand just why the curtsey was not a popular genuflection in America, even if we had any little cottager girls to practise it, which I did not think we had, exactly.

Later on we gathered round a fire, with the cats, under the quaint old portraits of very straight-backed dead-and-gone ladies Stacy in the drawing-room, and I told all I knew about the Apache Indians and Niagara Falls. I think I also set the minds of the Stacy family at rest about the curious idea that we want to annex Canada – they had some distant relations there, I believe, whom they did not want to see annexed – although it appeared that the relations had been heterodox on the subject, and had said they wouldn't particularly mind! I suggested that they were probably stock-raising in the Northwest out there, and found our tariff inconvenient; and the Stacys said Yes, they were. I continued that the union they would like to see was doubtless commercial, and not political; and the Stacys, when they thought of this, became more cheerful. Further on, the Squire handed me a silver candlestick at the foot of the stairs with the courtliness of three generations past; and as I went to bed by candle-light for the first time in my life, I wondered whether I would not suddenly arrive, like this, at the end of a chapter, and find that I had just been reading one of Rhoda Broughton's novels. But in the morning it came in at the window with the scent of the lilacs, and I undoubtedly heard it again – 'Cuckoo!'…'Cuckoo!'