CHAPTER XVIII

ST. GILES’S FAIR

There was a great gathering of townspeople and country people in the old town of Oxford. “What can be going on?” exclaimed Miss Cavendish, who, with her girls, was turning the corner by old St. Michael’s Church. She stopped to question a gaping countryman, who looked at her open-mouthed. What benighted being was this who could be upon the spot and not know about St. Giles’s Fair? But he gathered sufficient pity and understanding to tell them what they wanted to know.

“We must ask Mrs. Birch about it when we get back from market,” said Sidney. This attending to their own marketing was a great frolic, and one which added zest to their appetites when meal-time came. The market offered fresh country vegetables and fruit and was an attractive little place to the three who had come to regard bacon and eggs as a dish to be avoided when possible. Here they could select according to the taste of each and were always very content. Having completed this duty, they went back to their lodgings to give their orders and to gain information.

“Yes, ma’am, thank you, ma’am,” said their landlady. “I’ll do the mushrooms for your luncheons, and ’ow would you like your heggs, miss?”

“They’d be good scrambled, wouldn’t they?” suggested Sidney.

“You may scramble them, Mrs. Birch,” said Miss Cavendish. But the good woman looked mystified; she had never ’eard of scrambled heggs. “Stirred eggs,” suggested Miss Cavendish. But this method seemed no more familiar to Mrs. Birch than the other, there were further explanations and at last a gleam of intelligence flashed from Mrs. Birch’s eye. “Hit’s buttered heggs you mean, miss, thank you, miss.” And thereafter buttered eggs became a part of their bill of fare.

St. Giles’s Fair, they were told, was not what it had been; it was a noisy, foolish performance which Mrs. Birch doubted if the ladies would care to see, but if they should like a glimpse of it the evening would be the liveliest. Therefore they bided their time till night should fall, and meanwhile they occupied themselves with the treasures of the Bodleian Library, peeped in at Tom Quad, took a hasty view of the ivied walls of Pembroke and other colleges which they would examine more closely later on.

“I almost hate to leave our comfortable sitting-room,” said Sidney with a regretful look at the lighted lamp and the open piano. “I have been in no such homelike place since I left America.”

“We’ll have our homelike places all back again soon enough,” replied Gabriella, “but we shall not be able to see St. Giles’s Fair.”

Therefore they started out and elbowed their way through a throng of jostling men and women who had come a-fairing, and soon they found themselves in the very centre of the excitement. Side shows were everywhere, calliopes, street pianos, brazen horns, fairly deafened them; and the vendors of nostrums and novelties crying their wares added to the Babel of noise. For the rest, be it said, it was a quiet crowd. There was little boisterous merriment, no loud-voiced, piercing, nasal conversation. Indeed, it was ludicrously “unnoisy,” Gabriella said. “The English have a silent way of taking things, anyhow,” she remarked. “If a man gets angry with his wife, and chucks her out of the house, he growls something in an undertone, you hear a dull thud and that is all. One day in London I happened to hear two men who were having an altercation; you could see by their set faces that they were simply boiling mad inside, but all that I heard in the very lowest pitched, contemptuous tones was ‘You are a wehm,’ from one man, and the other one said in quite the same manner: ‘If I am a wehm, you are a loathsome wehm,’ and that was all of it; vituperation could go no further than to call a man a loathsome worm. Oh, do look, Gem.”

Miss Cavendish turned her head to see a quartette of girls with long wands in their hands; the wands were tipped with something fuzzy with which they touched the faces of such chance young man as took their fancy, and the swain returned the attention by flinging a handful of flour upon the damsel. In some cases when the little wand was too persistently used the young woman was caught and kissed, though, unlike an American girl upon such a provocation, she neither struggled nor shrieked, neither did she laugh loudly. Her friends might giggle softly, but the whole performance was so matter-of-fact, there was such a spirit of imperturbability evidenced that Sidney and Gabriella were amused beyond measure.

“It is the very funniest thing we have seen,” Sidney declared. “Imagine such a scene at one of our county fairs. Picture one of our American girls under similar circumstances and fancy her shrill laughter, her high-pitched protestations and all the rest of it. All the noise upon this occasion is made by those very unmusical instruments, and those clap-trappers.”

A short survey of the fair served them, and they returned to their lodgings, caring little for merry-go-rounds, Punch and Judy shows, jugglers and charlatans.

“I am afraid I am fickle,” announced Gabriella as they entered the cosey apartment. “I am beginning to feel myself false to Italy because I am realizing the delights of clean English lodgings. Fancy being able always to live in a beautiful old historic English town with green meadows and winding streams at your very door, and of having the comforts of home with no bother of servants; of being able to do your own marketing and of feeling sure that your food will be served and cooked perfectly and your rooms kept in exquisite order by a soft-voiced, respectable woman who never is supercilious nor condescending, but who, on the contrary, is humbly delighted that you favor her house with your presence. It is such an entirely new sensation that I am wondering if it isn’t the very idealest existence of any.”

“Shall you take out naturalization papers to-morrow?” asked Sidney.

“Not quite so soon; I haven’t seen Scotland yet.”

“Nor Wales.”

A vivid blush overspread Gabriella’s cheek. “Please spare a trembling maid,” she begged. “Have pity upon my condition of uncertainty and dread.”

Sidney laughed and picked up her shining brass candlestick, remarking that she had letters to write.

Oxford was left behind with reluctance. It was tantalizing not to be able to wander down Addison’s walk more than once, not to become more than half familiar with “the noblest old street in England,” nor to linger more leisurely in the sweet gardens and the dignified college halls. Yet, with passage taken for a settled sailing, time was pressing and there was still much which they felt they could not leave out of their trip. Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon held them for two or three days, then, as they journeyed on from Lincoln to York and Durham, their enthusiasm waxed warmer and warmer as the cathedral towns led them from glory to glory.

“I don’t believe either of the others can be finer than Lincoln,” declared Gabriella. “I have made my choice and nothing will budge me. Where will you find anything as beautiful as that Angel Choir, where anything as grotesque as that dear little imp? Where shall we see such a wonderful vaulting as that which springs from that single shaft in the Chapter House? And surely nothing can rival its site at the top of that mighty hill overlooking the Witham. I may appear obstinate to you after this, but Lincoln has my heart and I shall not give it to either York or Durham.”

York was reached that same night, for it was intended to make the most of time and to reach Durham early the next afternoon, take a hasty view of the cathedral and arrive in Edinburgh that same evening, it being Saturday.

“I have the address of a well recommended hotel,” said Miss Cavendish, fumbling in her bag for her address book. “We will go there. It is very near the station, I was told, so we can walk.” But though they wandered about for half an hour, the small hotel seemed to have lost itself utterly, for no trace of it could they discover and could find no one who knew it. At last they were directed to an inn which presented a very attractive exterior, fresh paint and a fine old doorway giving them the impression that here they would find ease and comfort. They inquired for rooms, and were told that though the house was rather full they could be accommodated. A shock-headed youth escorted them up the stairs, down a hallway and into a back room.

“Dear me,” Miss Cavendish looked at her companions, “I am afraid this will not do.”

The youth stood stolidly, open-mouthed and unresponsive, but a direct question brought the information that there was no other room to be had.

“It is too late to look elsewhere,” Miss Cavendish decided.

“But this is a feather bed,” said Gabriella; “we can never sleep on that this warm night.”

No amount of questioning seemed to bring any suggestion to the vacant brain of Boots. When he did venture upon the semblance of a sentence it was in such unintelligible Yorkshire dialect that he might as well have saved himself speech. At last Miss Cavendish inquired, “Is there a chambermaid?” There was. “Send her to me.” To their relief the chambermaid was a brisk capable body who took in the situation. It was true that there was no other room vacant. The town was quite full, and the hotels were pressed to their utmost capacity. The feather bed could be removed and placed underneath the mattress if the ladies wished. “Where’s that Boots?”

After some moments Boots reappeared, looking wholly scared, dense and stupid, but his arms were muscular if his tongue was rusty and it appeared to be little trouble to make such changes as should give the travellers a hope of a good night’s rest.

The breakfast was execrable and the price charged by an over pious text-quoting landlady was not modest. “Next time I arrive in York it will be daylight,” decided Miss Cavendish as they took their departure from the house.

“Yet,” returned Gabriella, “I wouldn’t have missed Boots for anything. He answers so perfectly to my ideal of a thick-headed Yorkshire bumpkin that I am satisfied to have met him under such circumstances rather than to have had him left out of my life. He is the most deliciously earth-born churl I have ever encountered. That shock head, that gaping mouth, those lustreless eyes, that vacant stare, when shall we ever meet their like again?”

“But there’s the Minster,” exclaimed Sidney as they approached the great cathedral after their tour of the old city walls. The grand proportions of the building impressed them all, the fantastic gargoyles especially pleased Gabriella. Sidney was delighted with the beautiful stained glass, Miss Cavendish was enthusiastic over the Chapter House. They had walked the length and breadth of the immense interior, had entered the crypt, and had examined many of the details of the cathedral’s beautiful interior by the time the hour of twelve warned them that they must soon leave.

“Stop,” whispered Sidney, “something is going to happen.” In the vast aisles a grave company was assembling. From the chancel wound a long procession of clergy and singers chanting a miserere which echoed through the vast transept toward which the procession was moving. Then through the door, from the bright September weather outside was borne a bier. That this was an occasion of more than usual solemnity the appearance of all indicated. This was the funeral of an esteemed member of the clergy. There were vested priests and choir boys, long-veiled deaconesses and members of guilds. The slow cortège proceeded up the church and with the echoing minor notes of the music in their ears the three Americans stepped out into the sunshine and life from which the old canon had just been borne.

“It was the climax,” whispered Sidney. “Wasn’t it wonderful to see that solemn procession, to hear that heart-breaking music in that most wonderful of cathedrals? You may have Lincoln, Gabriella, but for my