Part 9

I knew an artist once who climbed round by these jagged rocks, and slipped down between two of them and sprained his ankle, just as they do in the penny novelettes. But there the resemblance ceased. The artists in the novelettes are always handsome and of a god-like grace, and they wear moustaches of a delightfully silken texture, and velveteen coats, and talk pretty, like nothing or no one ever _did_ talk. This fellow, to the contrary, was as ugly a beggar as one might meet in a long day’s march, and he was as awkward as a duck out of water, and instead of a velveteen coat he wore a blazer of the most inartistic and thrilling combinations of coloured stripes. He said velveteen coats were all “bally rot,” which shows how vulgar he could be on occasion. No artist in the novelettes ever said “bally rot,” I’m sure.

Also, he smoked tobacco of the rankest and most objectionable kind, and he never wore a moustache at all, and shaved only once a week, so that no self-respecting girl was ever known to allow herself to be kissed by him more than once. I can’t understand how all this could be: it doesn’t resemble the novelettes one little bit. But this artist was like the artists in the tales in one particular; he painted superlatively, as thoroughly, indeed, as he swore and drank, and that is saying a great deal.

Well, as I was saying, he slipped down between two rocks and sprained his ankle. He didn’t, like those (I fear) apocryphal artists in the stories, lie there gracefully and quote Shakespeare and Dr. Watts about it, until two lovely heiresses to untold millions came along in a boat and rescued him from the rising tide, and fell in love with him and married the fellow (one of them, I mean; the other--in the stories--dies of a broken heart).

No! He lay there and swore dreadfully, until some fishermen came along and refused to take him off in their boat until he had paid them a sov., money down, when he swore (if possible) more dreadfully than before. No beautiful girls came and rescued him at all; only one old maid passed, who, thinking he was drunk, gave him a tract, warned him against the evils of intemperance, and went away, shocked at the “language” he used.

This is a very sad and unromantic episode, I know, but things do fall out thus in real life. If this simple story should prove of any use to realistic novelists, I’m sure I should be only too proud for them to use it.

Meanwhile, let us away to Torquay. Here a steep and rugged path, leading up the face of the cliff, brings us to Labrador. Every visitor to Teignmouth goes also to Labrador, a name not usually coupled with sunshine and sparkling sea, _al fresco_ teas, and roses at a penny a piece. He was a romantic mercantile Jack, who, retiring from the Newfoundland and North American seas, laid out his precarious little estate and built this little house on it, and named his domain after an inhospitable coast. He has voyaged long since into the Unknown, and his romance has gone with him, for the place is now but a superior sort of tea-garden, where you drink your tea and eat your cream and strawberries in the open-air arbours and the society of innumerable centipedes and spiders.

You cannot fare farther along the coast-line, just here, without becoming bedevilled amid fallen rocks and rising tides; and to climb the cliffs at a venture might haply result in being hung up on some impracticable ledge, whence advance or retreat would be alike impossible. So we climbed the usual, though precipitous, path past Labrador on to the cliff-top, and from thence across ruddy fields to the dusty highway, along which, to our surprise, came two Italians with a piano-organ. O Herrick!

The minstrels from the town are gone-- On Devon roads you’ll find ’em; They play “Ta-ra,” “He’s Got ’em On” (Those cursed tunes), and grind ’em, Both day and night, in curly chords, On organs called “piano;” They hail, these handle-turning hordes, From Tiber, or the Arno.

To “Get Your Hair Cut” they incite, In thrilling shakes and catches, With notes that thunder day and night; They grind ’em forth in batches. “’Ow _you’d_ like ’Awkins for your other name,” They play “_expressione_”-- Away! you errant sons of song, To home, and--macaroni.

“_Piano_” do they call the things? I wish they were so, really. “_Fortissimo_,” their torture rings-- I’d like to smash ’em, dearly. _Tommaso_ from Bologna hails; _Paolo_ from Napoli; Their organ, with its trills and wails, Proceeds from place unholy.

“Would the signori lika ze musique?” and, suiting the action to the word, the chief brigand gave the organ-handle a turn. Out leaped the initial bars of--yes, let it be named--“Ta-ra-ra Boom de Ay.” The signori would _not_ like any; please to go away. “What,” asked the Wreck, “is the Italian for ‘take your hook?’” But I didn’t know, and so, in default, to cut matters short, we took ours.

There was no escaping the ubiquitous tune that was our “only wear” in matters musical last year. The very trains that rattled one down to the sounding sea pounded it out to the alert ear as they ran along the metals; the fly-man, who drove you at a crawling pace to your “digs.,” whistled it; and your landlady’s daughter (“a dear good girl, sir, an’ clever at ’er music, which she takes after me in, though I ses it as shouldn’t. Play the gentleman something, there’s a love”) thumped it out unmercifully. Seaside landladies, by the way, have always, by some strange dispensation of Providence, three things apparently inseparable from their race--a daughter, a piano, and a sea-view. The daughter plays on the piano, and the landlady harps upon the view--both musical, you see. Most, also, have “seen better days,” and as it usually rains when I visit those yellow sands, the statement admits of no dispute.

XXXVIII.

The coast here is serrated with tiny bays, from which run valleys, called in Devonshire “coombes,” or “combes,” variously. Of these, Watcombe is perhaps best known. Sometimes the combe has become a town, as at Babbacombe.

Maidencombe is one of the smallest and prettiest of those deep and narrow valleys, clothed with a rich vegetation, and thickly wooded with giant elms, retired, and, what Devonshire folk call “loo,” or “lew,” that is, sheltered. There is, indeed, a secluded parish in Devon to whose name this commendatory adjective is prefixed--Lew Trenchard, to wit--noteworthy also as being the home of that strenuous author, the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould. On the other hand, there is yet another Lew in Devon--North Lew--in the northern part of the county, a wild, stormy, bleak, misbegotten place, whose name was probably conferred in derision by some deluded inhabitant; it is the place where, according to the local saying, the devil died of the cold!

Watcombe we passed, with its towering red rocks rising sheer out of the coombe; and, after toiling up hill and down dale, arrived at Babbacombe, a fairy settlement of villas adjoining Torquay’s suburb of Marychurch. Red sandstone rocks give place to lofty limestone cliffs, clothed in luxuriant foliage, and skirted about their base with beaches of rounded limestone pebbles of every size, smoothed and polished by constant friction of the water.

We took tea at the Carey Arms, upon the lawn that gives on the water; and admired, with the fleeting tourist’s regretful admiration, those blood-red and milk-white cliffs, and that foreshore of the whitest, hugest, and hardest marbles, and that sea of the most bewitching and impossible light-blue--impossible, that is to say, from the point of view of he or she who would transfer it to canvas--and bewildered brush-wielders are here the commonest objects of the seashore. Not the least of the things for which Torquay and Babbacombe are responsible are the wasting of good paint and the spoiling of many acres of fair primed canvas.

Beauty, you see, of any sort, is never harmless.

Leaving Babbacombe, we turned aside to visit Anstey’s Cove, that deep pool, guarded by ghostly pinnacles of rocks, and overhung with silver birch and brambles. Who was Anstey, and why was this cave named after him? Who, again (forgive the digression), was Tooks, and why was a court in Holborn made ridiculous with his name? We can only fold our hands, and say in either case, “We don’t know.”

Anstey’s Cove is a favourite bathing-place, and has at its entrance from the road a famous sign. The sign has been here for years, and is become quite a time-honoured institution. The original “Thomas,” I fear, is long since gathered to his fathers.

“Picnics supplied with hot water and tea At a nice little house down by the sea; Fresh Crabs and Lobsters every day, Salmon Peel sometimes, Red Mullet and Grey; The neatest of Pleasure Boats let out on hire; Fishing Tackle as good as you can desire; Bathing Machines for Ladies are kept, With Towels and Gowns all quite correct. Thomas is the man who provides everything: And also teaches Young People to Swim.”

Excellent and most moral Thomas! Mindful both of provisions and the proprieties, your truly British characteristics shall excuse your errors of rhyme and rhythm; and though your lines don’t scan, I trust your actions _là bas_ have attained a ready scansion _là haut_.

And now Torquay is near, happily situated on a down grade, for which praise be. But let us be duly reverent, for Torbay, shining yonder in the afternoon sun, is the gate by which entered, “for our goods,” as Fraulein Kilmansegg innocently observed, the Hanoverian dynasty, to save a nation which could not save itself.

XXXIX.

When first I saw Torquay and Torbay (I am afraid to think how many years ago), and the long line of curving coast stretching away past _parvenu_ Paignton to Berry Head, I thought that here was a veritable fairyland amongst seaside resorts. Many things have happened since then: the South Devon coast, once so solitary, so quiet, has everywhere its fringe of trim-built villas; the lonely coombes, once the home of rabbits and some few fishermen, echoing only with the querulous cries of sea-gulls, are now filled, or are filling, with bungalows, as quick-multiplying as were those ousted rabbits, and the brazen clang of German bands makes miserable the soul of man. These are the defects that make this fairyland of other years something less gracious and more prosaic than before; but bungalows and bands, and other kindred afflictions of a popular populous watering-place, have power only to discount, not altogether to bankrupt, its charm.

And charming is still the epithet for Torquay, seated majestically on its many hills. So charming is it, that the witchery of the place gets into the head of the average young man o’ nights, like so much champagne, and sitting by one of the many hillside winding walks overlooking the bay, you may hear him declare to his _inamorata_ that he loves her with a love transcending all other affections, past, present, or to come. And so these silly folk become engaged, and, one of these fateful days, they marry and go a-honeymooning in the Isle of Wight (an isle ordained by the Creator for such functions), presently to discover that life is not made up altogether of summer nights at Torquay, nor at Shanklin neither; also that, however warmly one may love, still number one remains, after all, when the flush of romance has worn off, the object of the most jealous and enduring affection. You see, Torquay is responsible for a great deal of match-making. Young folks have in after years much reason to cur--well, er, that is, to bless, the place.

How many declarations have I heard while lounging at twilight on the Cliff Walk! How many gay and giddy flirtations at Anstey’s Cove or Berry Pomeroy! Ah! delusive coast of Devon, inciting to the rashest of all conceivable rashnesses, you have proved the undoing of many a butterfly bachelor.

I have said enough to convince you, I think, that Torquay is a dangerous place. It is all the more so, in that, being essentially modern, there is nothing in the way of antiquities to explore in the town itself. This fact, together with that other of a warm and languorous climate, that invites to rest rather than to recreative efforts, to whispered confidences, to tentative kissing and waist-clasping on the sheltered Rock Walk above the Torbay road, shapes softly the social features of Torquay and the plastic destinies of youth.

To leave these features and come to consideration of scenic charms, there can be no higher praise than to say that at night Torquay picturesqueness reaches the acme of theatric scene-painting. To return, when the moon is shining, to Torquay from Paignton, is to experience a thrill of decorative pleasure that few other places can confer. A great bar of silver moonlight, all alive with ripples, mingles with terrestrial illuminations of villas and climbing hillside roads, garish yellow by comparison. Below, in the harbour, red and green and yellow lights of smacks and vessels of many builds dance in streaky minuets upon lazy tides, while on the horizon the mast-head lanterns of Brixham boats rise and fall giddily from crest to trough of Channel waves.

Torquay has many climates, from the warm and dense atmosphere of Fleet Street and Union Street to the mellow lapping of Torbay air by the rise of Park Hill, or the robustious breezes of Warberry Hill, farther inland. And thus Torquay pleases every variety of the querulous invalid: these feeble folk lie here in strata, elevated or depressed, as best befits their individual complaints.

Since Dutch William landed at Brixham, and so marched through Torquay to Newton Abbot with his heavy crew of Hollanders, the place has had no history save only the smooth and simple annals of what auctioneers and land-agents call a “rising watering-place.” And Torquay has been rising any time these hundred years, until it has at length been blessed with the left-handed blessings of a Mayor and Corporation. These be weighty matters, and Torquay celebrated its Charter Day last year with all the becoming pomp of so great and glorious an occasion. Minor happenings there have been that remain tinged with the bitter irony of circumstance, as when Napoleon, a captive on board the _Bellerophon_ (the “Billy Ruffian” of an untutored crew reckless of the classics) was brought into Torbay, within sight of the diminutive Torquay of that time. The conquered conqueror was reduced to the status of a Richardson’s show, to be peeped at by that “nation of shopkeepers” which he had so gratuitously despised.[3] That nation, or rather, this southern coast portion of it, had been not a little uneasy at Napoleon’s preparations for invasion, and had been strenuously devising defences, with quaking hearts; while the populace sang, to keep its pecker up, such reassuring songs about the improbable, as that of which the following stanza is a specimen:--

“When husbands with their wives agree, And maids won’t wed from modesty, _Then_ little Bony he’ll pounce down, And march his men on London town.”

After which followed the rousing chorus--

“Rollickum rorum, tol-lol lorum, Rollickum rorum, tol-lol lay.”

And these matters are Torquay’s sole concern with political history. Happy town, say I.

XL.

Three miles of a delightfully undulating road that leads close by the shores of the bay, and at length we reached Paignton about nine o’clock. Paignton lives on the leavings of Torquay, and a decent subsistence they seem to afford. It is unromantically celebrated for its cabbages, and peculiar for the German nomenclature of its hotels. The whole place is singularly and indecently Teutonic, a sort of Pumpernickel, and its chief street might appropriately be termed the Donnerwetterplatz, from the epithets called from us by its promiscuous stones. One anachronism there is in this Germanic town--German bands are plenty. We know, do we not, that these pests are found everywhere but in the land of their birth. But, come to think of it, where does the German band practise? The flippant will say that to assume any practice on their part would be an assumption of wildest extravagance; but, seriously, they must practise sometimes and somewhere; but where and when? Did you ever hear them at it? Did you ever see a dead donkey? Never! I have heard volunteer bands practise and have survived--chastened ’tis true. They have their drill-halls in which to harmonise in some sort; but (fearful thought) German bands must practise in their lodgings. I can think of few things more dreadful than to be their ill-fated neighbour.

Paignton is (equally with Washington) a place of magnificent distances, abounding in spacious roads all innocent of houses, or, at best, but sparsely built upon. But this is its modern part. The old town, which lies farther back from the sea, clustering round the red-sandstone tower of its ancient parish church, is close enough settled and occupied, and, judging from the size and beauty of that church, was at one time greater than now. There was of old a bishop’s palace at Paignton, and there yet remain sundry traces of it, among them a stalwart tower, wherein (says tradition) Miles Coverdale, some time Bishop of Exeter, made his famous translation of the Bible. Tradition, I regret to say, has in this instance grievously misled the devout; and, although the present historian yields to none in his love and admiration of a comely and well-rounded falsehood, it becomes his duty to destroy this interesting but misleading myth.

If I thought the audience to which these poor notes (one must be at least ostensibly modest!) are addressed would bear with me, I would describe the antiquarian treasures of Paignton Church, for they merit a moment’s stay. However, I forbear, although one cannot help quoting this inscription to the memory of “Mistress Joan Butland and son:”--

“In Night of death, here Rests y^e gooD, & fair, who all life Day, Gave God Both heart and ear, no Dirt (nor Distance) hinDerD her Resort, for love still Pav’D y^e way, & cut it short, to Parents, husBanD, frienDs none Better knew, y^e triBute of Duty & she PaiD it tow, BeloveD By, & loving all Dearly, her son to whom she first Gave life, then lost her owne he kinD Poor lamB for his Dam a full Year crieD, alas in vain, ther for for love he DieD _Anno Domi 1679_.”

From Paignton to Totnes the road leads inland by easy gradients past Blagdon, where nobody ever did anything worthy of record, until, in four miles, the little village of Berry Pomeroy is reached. This is the old road; the new highway, about one and a half miles out of Paignton, turns to the left, and in a lonely course reaches Totnes. The road past Blagdon to Berry is good, but the matter of a mile longer. That, however, is _no_ matter to the tourist, when, by that additional mile, so charming a ruin as that of Berry Pomeroy Castle is gained. These shattered walls and courts are hidden in deep lusty woods, resonant with the throaty gurglings of doves and wood-pigeons, teeming with a populace of squirrels, and moist with the invigorating rills that percolate everywhere, unseen but potent, amid the tangled undergrowth. Nothing now remains of the original stronghold: the great gateway and curtain-wall belong to the thirteenth century, and all else is of more modern date. The Pomeroys were of ancient descent, even when Ralph de la Pomeroy accompanied William the Norman from fair Normandy. The name has a sweet savour as of cider, for “pomeraie” means apple orchard, and from some such fruity demesne these Norman lords first took their name. It is a lengthy stride, though, from the Arcadian simplicity of the orchard, the fragrance of pomace, to the tilt-yard and the baronial hall.

From Ralph these estates passed down through the centuries to that Sir Thomas Pomeroy who, engaging in the futile rebellion of 1549, was stripped of all his manors, which fell into the hands of the Lord Seymour of Sudeley, brother to the Lord Protector, Duke of Somerset, and to this day they remain in that family. The Seymours builded all these courts and upstanding walls, now grass-grown and broken, or ivy-hung, that are enclosed by the ancient circumvallation. Defence was not a matter of such tremendous exiguity in the reign of Edward VI., when (or thereabouts) these Tudor walls and window-heads were freshly fashioned; comfort was of greater consideration, and that, by all accounts, was well studied. But with the reign of James II. came the ruination of Berry. Some have it that lightning destroyed the great range of buildings, but that is matter of tradition merely. Certain it is that never since that day have they been inhabited, “and all this glory” (as Prince hath it) “lieth in the dust.”

Prince himself, author of “Worthies of Devon,” and vicar of Berry Pomeroy, lies within the church, where Seymours and superseded Pomeroys lie close together--quietly enough. The Protector’s son, Lord Edward Seymour, lies here in effigy. He died (you learn) in 1593. His son, too, rests beside, and amid them sleeps this child, done in stone, humorously, as it seems to us, looking upon those radiant Dutch-like features.

XLI.

From woody dells and time-greyed walls to the highroad and modern Bridgetown, the suburb of Totnes, seemed a sorry change, though without the loveliness of Berry it had been fair enough. Bridgetown lies on one side of a narrow valley, Totnes on the other, and between them runs the Dart, crossed by a very serviceable, very modern, very uninteresting bridge, that stands sponsor to the suburb.

Totnes, say the historians, is the oldest, or one of the oldest, borough towns in England, founded, we are asked to believe, by Brutus the Trojan. We will not dispute the point: as well he as any one else. I will not (being transparently candid) deny that this particular Brutus seems to me, after this length of time, to be a very uninteresting person--a prosy fellow--one to be avoided.

But we will not, an’t please you, so readily drop the subject of Totnes town: that would not do, for not many such picturesque places remain in the south of England. Fore Street, which seems in these Devon towns to stand for High Street--although in some places in the county they are happy in the possession of both--Fore Street, Totnes, is a fine example of the unstudied, fortuitous, picturesque, from the projecting houses that overhang the pavements at one end, to the Eastgate that spans the street at the other, amid all the bustle and business of a town that, it would seem, is little affected by depression of the agricultural industries, upon which it lives.

There is a fine church at Totnes, with a stone pulpit, carved and gilt and painted to wonderment, and the tower of that church is among the best in Devon, an architectural dream, in ruddy sandstone, pinnacled, and adorned with tabernacles containing figures of kings and saints, benefactors, bishops, and pious founders. For aught I know (so lofty is their eyrie) Judhael de Totnais is of the company. This Judhael was one of the Conqueror’s host of filibusters, who, receiving his due share of plunder in the form of fat manors, settled at the chiefest of them, built himself a castle on a likely site, and, like some old regiments under modern War-Office administration, took a territorial title, “De Totnais.”