Part 14

And now it came on to rain with a deadly persistence that would have daunted us from setting out for Mevagissey had not letters been awaiting us at the post-office there. We set out at five o’clock in the afternoon, conveyed by the damp and undignified medium of a carrier’s cart without a tilt, crowded with country women returning from market, whose umbrellas sent trickling streams down our necks. Great pools of rain-water collected in the depressions of the tarpaulin that covered our knees, and washed furiously about as we were driven along the steep roads to the coast, so that we mentally prayed either for shine or Mevagissey. Just as we reached that odorous port, the rain ceased. We alighted (disembarked, I was about to say) “dem’d moist unpleasant bodies,” and asked the carrier as to the hotel. He said the “Ship” was the first hotel in the place, and to that sign we went. The “hotel” proved to be an inn, and the landlord of it wore an absurd air of astonishment when we proposed to stay there: he recommended us to private lodgings. This was scarcely a promising introduction to Mevagissey. It remotely resembled the reception accorded John Taylor, the “Water Poet,” on his travels in 1649.

He “trauelled twelue miles to a fisher Towne called _Mevageasie_; that Towne hath in it two Tauernes, and six Ale-houses, to euery one of which I went for lodging, and not anyone would harbour me, then I fought for a Constable to helpe me, but no Constable was to be found;[11] the people all wondring at me, as if I had been some strange Beast, or Monster brought out of _Affrica_; at which most incivill and barbarous useage, I began to be angry, and I perceiving that no body cared for my anger, I discreetely went into the house where I first demanded lodging; where the Hoste being very willing to give me the courteous entertainement of _Iack Drum_ commanded me very kindely to get me out of dores, for there was no roome for me to lodge in. I told her that I would honestly pay for what I tooke, and that if I could not haue a bed, yet I was sure of a house over my head, and that I would not out till the morning: with that a young saucy knave told me that if I would not go out, he would throw me out, at which words my choller grew high, my indignation hot, and my fury fiery, so that I arose from a bench, went to my youth, and dared to the combate: whereat the Hostesse (with feare and trembling) desired me to be quiet, and I should haue a bed, at which words my wrath was appeased, and my ire asswaged.

“But straite wayes another storme seemed to appeare for an ancient Gentleman came suddenly out of another Roome (who had heard all the former friendly passages,) and hee told mee that I should not lodge there, for though I had sought and not found a Constable, yet I should know that I had found a Justice of Peace before I sought him; and that he would see me safely lodged: I was somewhat amazed at his words, and answered him, Let him doe his pleasure, for I submitted my selfe to his disposall.

“To which he replyde, That I should go but halfe a mile with him to his house, which I did, and there his good Wife and he did entertayne me courteously, with such fare and lodging as might have accommodated any Gentleman of more worth and better quality then one that had been ten times in degree before me: There I stayd the Saturday, and all the Sunday, where I found more Protestant Religion in 2 dayes, then I had in 5 yeers before. The Gentlemans name is Mr. _Iohn Carew_, a Gentleman of noble and ancient descent, and a worthy Iustice of the Peace in those parts.”

We eventually found very comfortable rooms at a delightful villa-like house, looking directly on to the sea, beating in upon a rocky shore. This was the second place in which we touched the fringe of the titled aristocracy. Our landlady, upon our arrival, proudly showed us the fragments of an envelope addressed with the name of a Viscount who had been staying in the house. Eventually we paid a heavier bill than we should otherwise have done had none but miserable plebeians lodged here aforetime. We will, in future, be careful to select only the haunts of the Third Estate.

We don’t (strange to say) seem to hanker after titled folk of any sort--a curious trait in Britons, who, proverbially, are said to love lords. Perhaps we are among the proverbial exceptions, and help thereby to prove the rule. For myself, I hope (and think, indeed) I am a loyal subject of Her Majesty’s (Hats off, please!); I know, also, that I have Conservative ideas of an old, not to say a mediæval, type; but I would not go round the next street corner to catch a glimpse of the Sovereign, nor any of the Royal Family, for that matter, if they chanced to be there.

As for other titled personages, from Dukes to Knights Bachelors, down to that no-account thing, a German prince, with more quarterings to his “old coat” than square miles of territory to his name, I would not, for the sake of their titles, take any pleasure in their society. Can I explain these contradictory things? No, I can’t. I will say, merely, that no man’s views are indisputably logical, while, as for women’s--well, there! Once I kept watch, as some social Lubbock, upon the thoughts and sayings and actions of a Radical by conviction, yet not by practice, for he owned ground-rents and lent money on mortgages, and ground the faces of the poor horribly when he had the chance. He took the _Gutter Percher_ every evening, which proved his Radical bias; but he would go unconscionable distances under discouraging conditions to catch a fleeting glimpse of Royal personages. No man so proud as he when he returned one day, with stuck-out chin and air of importance, after having his hat-lifting salutation acknowledged in the Park by a very Great Personage indeed; none so constant in christening his numerous progeny after members of the Royal Family.

LX.

Mevagissey bears a great resemblance to Polperro. It stands at the bottom of a deep valley leading out into the sea, and has a little harbour, built in much the same fashion. When the tide is out and the harbour dry, the reek of fish-offal is just like that of Polperro, but (if possible) a trifle stronger and more essential. When the cholera visited Mevagissey in 1849, the inhabitants fled the place, and encamped on the hill-tops, the fishermen lying on board their smacks in Fowey Haven. One wonders how the Fowey folk liked it. Some few years ago a new granite pier was completed to form a southern arm to the harbour at Mevagissey. It cost £25,000, and the next storm punched a great hole in the middle of it, carrying away about half of the entire structure, and rendering the remainder not only useless but dangerous. It will cost £30,000 to set all right again.

At mid-day we set off by the coast, making for Veryan. We passed Porthmellin, a lonely cove, and then the road lay inland to a village with the Irish-like name of Gorran, a diminutive outlandish place, with an immense church, and a churchyard where whole generations of villagers are buried by families, each family to its own particular plot of ground, as it seemed. Half a mile to the south, in a rocky bay of the smallest dimensions, is the picturesque and delightful village of Gorran Haven, a feast of colour, even for Cornwall, so rich in sapphire seas, golden sands, and brilliantly lichened rocks. The sands were littered with lobster-pots, and a long row of bronzed and blue-jerseyed fishermen sat on an interminable bench, and blinked in the late afternoon sun. We stayed awhile and talked with them. Before we set off again for Veryan, we asked a fisherman how far it was, for we had given up all our faith in distances, as measured on our Reduced Ordnance Map. “Seven mile,” said he, “but you’re not going to walk there to-night?”

We assured him that such was our intention, and stepped out briskly along a road that wound in and out, and narrowed and broadened again in a curious manner, passing lonely little chapels set in the wildest of wildernesses.

As we came in view of St. Michael Caerhayes, seen afar off from high ground, we had before us the loveliest of evening effects. The colour of the sky ranged from deepest blue, through scarlets and flaming yellows, to a delicate puce. Great and heavy masses of woodland lay below at the rear of a castellated mansion, whose park-like lands stretched down to the very verge of a miniature bay, guarded by headlands of a diminutive cragginess. Between them lay a view of the open Channel, with the coast-line terminating in the abrupt wall of Deadman’s Head, and the sunlight struck full upon the water with a dazzle as of molten gold. We decided that Saint Michael Caerhayes was decidedly _the_ place for a night’s rest. But when we had descended into the valley, and thence up the road on the other side, and found no village, we began to have misgivings. A belated countryman whom we passed as the sun went down informed us that Saint Michael Caerhayes was half a mile farther on, and so we were reassured. We walked half a mile, and passed, perhaps, six cottages, but never an inn. Something tall and black loomed up in the now darkened sky. It was the church tower, and again we felt that our day’s journey was nearly done, for it is generally found that church and village inn are very near neighbours. But here the church stood solitary; not a house of any kind near it, and beyond it mere vagueness. We retraced our steps, and asked a contemplative youth, who sat astride a gate, where the village inn was. There was none! We had passed all there was of the village! Now our courage oozed away, and all pride with it. Could he (we asked) tell us where we might chance to get a night’s lodging? He would inquire, he said, and we followed him meekly. Inquiries were fruitless here; we were sent away with scant ceremony. At the lodge gates of the lordly mansion we had seen earlier we halted on our weary way, and asked if possibly we could be recommended to some resting-place. We had some faint hopes that they would take compassion upon us here, but the lodge-keeper, who pondered her head vainly to answer our question satisfactorily, made no offer. There was nothing for it, then, but to walk on to Veryan.

Night shut down impenetrable on the moorlands, and darkness brushed our faces as we plunged into the unknown from the inhospitable hamlet of Saint Michael Caerhayes. Civilisation became an unmeaning term, or if aught of significance the word yet retained, it left in the chambers of the mind a satiric tang; for the steep paths, rocky, winding, and altogether insignificant, upon which we presently fared to the seaboard, seemed rather fortuitous than planned, and an emphatic comment upon primary conditions, rather than a subdual of them.

It was the booming of the surf hundreds of feet below us that advised our coming upon the sea, and cottage windows, two or three, shining in glow-worm fashion, showed us where lay Port Holland, deep-set at the seaward end of a valley, where the unseen waves spent their force amid sands and stones, with a long-drawn sighing a-h-h-h, a-h-h-h.

To Port Holland instantly succeeded Saint Lo, in another bight--both wild, lonely, and (for us tourists, at least) shelterless. We spoke with two formless concentrations of blackness, who knew naught of accommodation for strangers, and readily (nay, with alacrity) gave us good night. Then we, with what cheer we might, to climb the road that now ascended inland the western side of a valley, moist and teeming with nocturnal life, that rustled and ran among the brake and underwood, and chirped and squeaked as our straying feet sent fragments of stone and rock rolling into its ferny lairs.

And now, on this solitary road, we lost our way at an occult forking of the path, uncharted by any finger-post. We felt assured of it as we walked on for miles, and the road wound round and about with never another sign of the sea, which should have been within hearing. At length the road forked again, with a sign-post set in a hedge at the angle. We had no matches; the hedge forbade any near approach to the finger-board.

For all the use it was, the sign-post need not have existed. After we had taken what looked the most likely road, and after another mile had been tramped, we came to another and more promising affair, which, we found, directed us, in the way we were going, to Grampound, a place we had not the remotest idea of visiting. There was nothing for it but to turn about and retrace our steps. This we did, and presently met some country folk. We could have embraced them, so long was it since we had seen any fellow-creatures, but we refrained, and merely asked the road and the distance to Veryan. Four and a half miles farther, it seemed.

With what haste and with how many more wrong turnings we pursued our way I will not speak.

We reached that village eventually, and only just before closing time. The windows of the one inn that Veryan possesses streamed brightly into the road as we fearfully crossed the threshold, and doubtfully begged (that is the word) a lodging for the night, and a meal to go to bed upon. I cannot call to mind the sign of that inn, but I have not forgotten the name of Mrs. Mason, our hostess. That were inexcusable, for surely no one could have been kinder to wearied wayfarers than she. We had tea (a high tea, to be sure) at that hour of night, and tea that night seemed ambrosia fit for gods. What a delightful tea that was! Cornish cream, new bread, apricot jam, and a mysteriously delicious preserve, whose name we never knew, but whose savour remains a fond and fast memory. And while tea progressed, we had music from the bar-parlour on the other side of the passage. Some one played upon a violin, and the airs he played were old sea-songs, that were new when Dibdin wrote, and popular when British sailors wore pig-tails, and fought the Frenchman and the Spaniard from youth to age; times when every man had his fill of fighting, and the stomach for it, too. So it befell that, even with that crazy fiddle and that unfinished performer, the songs he played were melodies that went straight to the heart, even as they originally came from that seat of a throbbing patriotism; tunes that made the pulses dance, the eyes to sparkle, and the cheek to flush. We have no need for such songs now, for we meet no foreign foe to-day. No storms rend the branches of the oak: the tree, alas! is rotting at the heart. Ah! the pity, the misery of it.

LXI.

Judge of our surprise when we found this morning that Veryan was not upon the sea, but over a mile removed from it. We had carelessly noted Veryan Bay marked on the map, and thus concluded that of course the village of the same name was seated beside the sea. We left our inn and Veryan with our pockets filled with the apples our kindly hostess pressed upon us at parting. My hostess, I salute you!

All through this day we wandered blunderingly, as if we had been chartless. Certainly, when the maps deal with such little-travelled districts as this, they become utterly untrustworthy for by-roads, and are only to be followed with suspicion for the highways. We set out for Truro, and at the outset were seduced from the narrow path by the tempting clusters of blackberries that hung upon the hedges of a hillside field. This led us at length upon the hamlet of Treworlas, a few scattered houses set down upon the edges of a golden moor, free to every breeze that blows, where the winds beat upon the walls of the cottages and shook them, and fluttered the feathers of the scurrying geese that patched the gold of the gorse and the green of the grass with moving patches of white. There was a house to let here, an empty house, with garden all overgrown with weeds, and a bill swinging in the window by one corner; not at all an undesirable little place--for a hermit. We inquired the rent of it--£5 per annum. Just the place for retirement from one’s kind: the ideal retreat for one crossed in love or soured by failure, or for the naturally misanthropical; we bear it in mind, for, though we are none of these, yet a time may come! From here we went on to Philleigh, a village that stands on a tongue of land pushing out into the salt-water Fal, where Ruan Creek sends spreading watery fingers between the hills. Steep, rain-washed roads, unkempt and deep rutted, lead down to the water, and a homely inn, with flaunting linen hanging out to dry, and gobbling ducks scavenging among the cart-tracks, wears a name remarkably poetic--The Roseland Inn. A forest of thick-growing, stunted oaks leads to the steam ferry at Trelissick, where the Fal winds between lovely woods that grow down to the water’s edge, and dip their branches in the stream. We crossed here mistakenly, thinking it to be King Harry Passage, and thus missing a sight of Tregothnan, Lord Falmouth’s country seat, famed in all the country round about for the charm of its situation.

As the afternoon wore on to tea-time, we came into Truro, along a broad and surprisingly well-kept highway. But never a sight was there of the city until we had reached the hillside, where its outskirts of villas straggle into the country, detached and semi-detached, with lawns and flower-beds and gravel-paths, ah! so neat and clean-swept, all of them bearing the most high-falutin’ names. Truro is folded away from distant sight, in between the hills, where the Fal ceases its navigable course.

Truro is admirably situated, but the city does not do justice to its site. Its buildings, substantial and enduring enough, since they are built of granite, are commonplace in design, and their tameness of outline is a weariness to the spirit, save, indeed, some modern commercial structures that savour of architecture; but to mention these by name in this place would be to incur suspicion of advertisement. We came into the city down Lemon Street, past the melancholy statue of Lander the explorer, standing atop of his Doric pillar, and were disappointed on the instant of entering it by these things, and by the colour-scheme of the place--a heavy grey, unrelieved by brick or other stone than native granite. The prevailing stoniness continued even in the roadways, paved with granite setts.

Truro is now a cathedral city, with a cathedral in course of construction in its midst. Already the choir and the transepts are completed and consecrated, so we may form some idea of what the building will eventually look like. Its style is Early English, singularly refined and symmetrically ordered as regards the interior, but “exteriorly”--as architectural slang hath it--it has an appearance at once cramped and overladen with ornament of too minute a character, and is “picturesque” with a studied ready-made quaintness that does a hurt to the dignity of such a building. This irregularity of external details, and the whimsical incidence of turret and spirelet, belong, properly, not to an original building, but should be the outcome of generations of alteration and addition, grafted by the varying tastes of posterity upon a well-balanced design. Perhaps it was necessary for the winning of the competition for the architect to send in a showy elevation that should take the eyes of a committee, and in this Mr. Pearson succeeded, but he has failed to satisfy a reasonable demand for dignity and repose to the outward view.

The cathedral will be 300 feet in length, with two western towers and a central spire. Its site, though central, is somewhat unfortunate, because hemmed closely with the surrounding houses of High Cross. It was the site of the old Church of Saint Mary, which became of cathedral rank on the establishment of the Truro diocese in 1877, but was demolished in favour of the new scheme, saving its south aisle, retained and incorporated with the new building.

It was while I was sketching the cathedral from a point of vantage in the High Street, surrounded, meanwhile, by an intensely interested crowd of boys, that a stranger, apologising for the interruption, came up and asked me if I would mind going with him to his house, and giving an opinion as to the genuineness of a reputed Reynolds painting he had bought for some few shillings. The picture proved to be a sorry daub; but none the less for the adverse opinion, Mr. ---- proved very friendly, and, as he was driving to Redruth that evening, invited self and friend to accompany him at an appointed time.

LXII.

Punctually to appointment we set forth, and once past the incline by which the city is left, whizzed along the smooth highway in the rear of a sturdy cob. We cleared the suburbs, and presently came upon the great mining-field that stretches its seamed and blasted waste over mile upon mile of dingy hummocks and ruined engine-houses. Here and there green oases of private parks and pleasaunces alleviate the harshness of the towering piles of mining refuse that harbour no green thing. But for these the scene is an abomination of desolation. Chacewater, a commonplace, mile-long village, with a poetical name, set beside the highroad amidst the heaps of rubbish, is a place of no conceivable interest.

Our acquaintance beguiled the way with local legends and scraps of entertaining information, and the sight of Chacewater moved him to tell us this story:--

“Now Truro,” said he, “Truro used to have a bootmaking industry, and in those times no love was lost between Truro folk and the miners of Chacewater, I can tell you. Now, it so happened that my father was driving home with a companion from Redruth one dark night, when, a short distance out of Chacewater, a crowd of miners rushed out from an old engine-house by the wayside and made for the trap, shouting, ‘Truro cobblers!’ My father had been mistaken, in all likelihood, for another party, but it seemed likely the error would not be found out until the occupants of the trap had been severely handled. My father, though, was a man of resource. He had bought, among other things, some brass candlesticks at Redruth that day, and he suddenly remembered them. Snatching up one in either hand, he dropped the reins, and presenting the candlesticks point-blank, shouted, ‘Hands off, or, by the Lord, I’ll shoot ’ee!’

“The miners left in a hurry.”

In the meanwhile we had come to Saint Day, which the Cornish folk call Saint _Dye_, a little market-town situated in midst of mines, living on mines, and sorry or glad only as mining prospers or is depressed. Saucy Cornish girls blew kisses to us from the windows of Saint Day. Sauciness is a quality in which the girls of Cornwall are rich. Alas! our friend drove through the narrow streets all unheeding, like another Jehu. If we had known him longer we would have cursed him for it, but he was a “new chum,” and it could not be done. Discourtesy is always reserved for friends of old standing. And thus we drove into Redruth on a Saturday afternoon.

Redruth still remains a busy and populous town, despite the exhausted condition of its neighbouring mining-fields. It is an unlovely town, built at the bottom and sides of a valley, amid the scarred and tumbled mine refuse of a thousand years.

The name of Redruth is one that invites attention: it is a name that is more attractive than the town itself. Philological antiquarians profess to find its derivation in the Cornish _Tretrot_, which, being interpreted, means “the house on the bed of the river.” But from such airy surmisings it is better to turn aside to the bed-rocks of modern facts. For it was at Redruth that Murdoch, in 1792, discovered gas as an illuminant; here, too, the same engineer invented the traction-engine some four years later. The country-folk, who met it on the roads at night, thought it was the devil.