From a Cornish Window Part 22

In the early numbers of our _Cornish Magazine_ a host of contributors (some of them highly distinguished) discussed the question, 'How to develop Cornwall as a holiday resort.' 'How to bedevil it' was, I fear, our name in the editorial office for this correspondence. More and more as the debate went on I found myself out of sympathy with it, and more and more in sympathy with a lady who raised an indignant protest--

"Unless Cornishmen look to it, their country will be spoilt before they know it. Already there are signs of it--pitiable signs; Not many months ago I visited Tintagel, which is justly one of the prides of the Duchy. The 'swinging seas' are breaking against the great cliffs as they broke there centuries ago when Arthur and Launcelot and the Knights of the Round Table peopled the place.

The castle is mostly crumbled away now, but some fraction of its old strength still stands to face the Atlantic gales, and to show us how walls were built in the grand old days. In the valley the gra.s.s is green and the gorse is yellow, and overhead the skies are blue and delightful: but facing Arthur's Castle--grinning down, as it were, in derision--there is being erected a modern hotel--'built in imitation of Arthur's Castle,' as one is told! . . . There is not yet a rubbish shoot over the edge of the cliff, but I do not think I am wrong in stating that the drainage is brought down into that cove where long ago (the story runs) the naked baby Arthur came ash.o.r.e on the great wave!"

In summing up the discussion I confess with shame that I temporised.

It was hard to see one's native country impoverished by the evil days in which mining (and to a lesser degree, agriculture) had fallen; to see her population diminis.h.i.+ng and her able-bodied sons emigrating by the thousand. It is all very pretty for a visitor to tell us that the charm of Cornwall is its primaeval calm, that it seems to sleep an enchanted sleep, and so on; but we who inhabit her wish (and not altogether from mercenary motives) to see her something better than a museum of a dead past. I temporised therefore with those who suggested that Cornwall might yet enrich herself by turning her natural beauty to account: yet even so I had the sense to add that--

"Jealous as I am for the beauty of our Duchy, and delighted when strangers admire her, I am, if possible, more jealous for the character of her sons, and more eager that strangers should respect _them_. And I do see (and hope to be forgiven for seeing it) that a people which lays itself out to exploit the stranger and the tourist runs an appreciable risk of deterioration in manliness and independence. It may seem a brutal thing to say, but as I had rather be poor myself than subservient, so would I liefer see my countrymen poor than subservient. It is not our own boast--we have it on the fairly unanimous evidence of all who have visited us--that hitherto Cornishmen have been able to combine independence with good manners.

For Heaven's sake, I say, let us keep that reputation, though at great cost! But let us at the same time face the certainty that, when we begin to take pay for entertaining strangers it will be a hard reputation to keep. Were it within human capacity to decide between a revival of our ancient industries, fis.h.i.+ng and mining, and the development of this new business, our decision would be prompt enough. But it is not."

I despaired too soon. Our industries seem in a fair way to revive, and with that promise I recognise that even in despair my willingness to temporise was foolish. For my punishment--though I helped not to erect them,--hideous hotels thrust themselves insistently on my sight as I walk our magnificent northern cliffs, and with the thought of that drain leading down to Arthur's cove I am haunted by the vision of Merlin erect above it, and by the memory of Hawker's canorous lines:--

"He ceased; and all around was dreamy night: There stood Dundagel, throned; and the great sea Lay, like a strong va.s.sal at his master's gate, And, like a drunken giant, sobbed in sleep!"

SEPTEMBER.

IN THE BAG, _August 30th_.

At the village shop you may procure milk, b.u.t.ter, eggs, peppermints, trowsers, sun-bonnets, marbles, coloured handkerchiefs, and a number of other necessaries, including the London papers. But if you wish to pick and choose, you had better buy trowsers than the London papers; for this is less likely to bring you into conflict with the lady who owns the shop and a.s.serts a prior claim on its conveniences. One of us (I will call him X) went ash.o.r.e and asked for a London 'daily.' "Here's _Lloyd's Weekly News_ for you," said the lady; "but you can't have the daily, for I haven't finished reading it myself." "Very well," said I, when this was reported; "if I cannot read the news I want, I will turn to and write it."

So I descended to the shop, and asked for a bottle of ink; since, oddly enough, there was none to be found on board. The lady produced a bottle and a pen. "But I don't want the pen," I objected. "They go together,"

said she: "Whatever use is a bottle of ink without a pen?" For the life of me I could discover no answer to this. I paid my penny, and on returning with my purchases to the boat, I propounded the following questions:--

(1) _Quaere_. If, as the lady argued, a bottle of ink be useless without a pen, by what process of reasoning did she omit a sheet of paper from her pennyworth?

(2) Suppose that I damage or wear out this pen before exhausting the bottle of ink, can she reasonably insist on my taking a second bottle as a condition of acquiring a second pen?

(3) Suppose, on the other hand, that (as I compute) one pen will outlast two and a half bottles of ink; that one bottle will distil thirty thousand words; and that the late James Anthony Froude (who lived close by) drew his supply of writing materials from this shop: how many unused pens (at a guess) must that distinguished man have acc.u.mulated in the process of composing his _History of England?_

We sailed into Salcombe on Sat.u.r.day evening, in a hired yacht of twenty-eight tons, after beating around the Start and Prawl against a sou'westerly wind and a strong spring tide. Now the tide off the Start has to be studied. To begin with, it does not coincide in point of time with the tide insh.o.r.e. The flood, or east stream, for instance, only starts to run there some three hours before it is high water at Salcombe; but, having started, runs with a vengeance, or, to be more precise, at something like three knots an hour during the high springs; and the consequence is a very lively race. Moreover, the bottom all the way from Start Point to Bolt Tail is extremely rough and irregular, which means that some ten or twelve miles of vicious seas can be set going on very short notice. Altogether you may spend a few hours here as uncomfortably as anywhere up or down Channel, with the single exception of Portland Race. If you turn aside for Salcombe, there is the bar to be considered; and Salcombe bar is a danger to be treated with grave respect. The _Channel Pilot_ will tell us why:--

"There is 8 ft. water at L.W. springs on the bar at the entrance, but there are patches of 6 feet. Vessels drawing 20 ft. can cross it (_when the sea is smooth_) at H.W. springs, and those of 16 ft. at H.W. neaps. In S. gales there is a breaking, heavy sea, and no vessel should then attempt the bar; in moderate S.

winds vessels may take it at high water."

The bearing of these observations on the present narrative will appear anon. For the present, entering Salcombe with plenty of water and a moderate S.W. breeze, we had nothing to distract our attention from the beauty of the spot. I suppose it to be the most imposing river-entrance on the south coast; perhaps the most imposing on any of the coasts of Britain. But being lazy and by habit a s.h.i.+rker of word-painting, I must have recourse to the description given in Mr. Arthur Underhill's _Our Silver Streak_, most useful and pleasant of handbooks for yachtsmen cruising in the Channel:--

"As we approach Salcombe Head (part of Bolt Head), its magnificent form becomes more apparent. It is said to be about four hundred and thirty feet in height, but it looks very much more. Its base is hollowed out into numerous caverns, into which the sea dashes, while the profile of the head, often rising some forty or fifty feet sheer from the water, slopes back at an angle of about forty-five degrees in one long upward sweep, broken in the most fantastic way into numerous pinnacles and needles, which remind one forcibly of the _aiguilles_ of the valley of Chamounix. I do not think that any headland in the Channel is so impressive as this."

As we pa.s.sed it, its needles stood out darkly against a rare amber sky-- such a glow as is only seen for a brief while before a sunset following much rain; and it had been raining, off and on, for a week past.

I daresay that to the weatherwise this glow signified yet dirtier weather in store; but we surrendered ourselves to the charm of the hour.

Unconscious of their doom the little victims played. We crossed the bar, sailed past the beautiful house in which Froude spent so many years, sailed past the little town, rounded a point, saw a long quiet stretch of river before us, and cast anchor in deep water. The address at the head of this paper is no sportive invention of mine. You may verify it by the Ordnance Map. We were in the Bag.

I awoke that night to the hum of wind in the rigging and the patter of rain on deck. It blew and rained all the morning, and at noon took a fresh breath and began to blow viciously. After luncheon we abandoned our project of walking to Bolt Head, and chose such books from the cabin library as might decently excuse an afternoon's siesta. A scamper of feet fetched me out of my berth and up on deck. By this time a small gale was blowing, and to our slight dismay the boat had dragged her anchors and carried us up into sight of Kingsbridge. Luckily our foolish career was arrested for the moment; and, still more luckily, within handy distance of a buoy--laid there, I believe, for the use of vessels under quarantine.

We carried out a hawser to this buoy, and waited until the tide should ease and allow us to warp down to it. Our next business was with the peccant anchors. We had two down--the best anchor and kedge; and supposed at first that the kedge must have parted. But a couple of minutes at the capstan rea.s.sured us. It was the kedge which had been holding us, to the extent of its small ability. And the Bag is an excellent anchorage after all, but not if you happen to get your best anchor foul of its chain. We hauled up, cleared, warped down to the buoy; and then, hoisting mizzen and headsails, cast loose and worked back to our old quarters.

The afternoon's amus.e.m.e.nt, though exciting enough in its way, was not what we had come to Salcombe to seek. And since the weather promised nothing better, and already a heap of more or less urgent letters must be gathering dust in the post office at Plymouth, we resolved to beat over the bar at high water next morning (_this_ morning), and, as Mr. Lang puts it, 'know the brine salt on our lips, and the large air again': for there promised to be plenty of both between Bolt Head and the Mewstone.

'Shun delays, they breed remorse,' and 'Time wears all his locks before'

(or, as the Fourth-form boy translated it in pentameter, "_Tempus habet nullat posteriori comas_"). The fault was mine for wasting an invaluable hour among the 'shy traffickers' of Salcombe. By the time we worked down to the bar the tide had been ebbing for an hour and a half.

The wind still blew strong from the south-west, and the seas on the bar were not pleasant to contemplate. Let alone the remoter risk of sc.r.a.ping on one of the two shallow patches which diversify the west (and only practicable) side of the entrance, it one of those big fellows happened to stagger us at the critical moment of 'staying' it would pretty certainly mean disaster. Also the yacht (as I began by saying) was a hired one, and the captain tender about his responsibility. Rather ignominiously, therefore, we turned tail; and just as we did so, a handsome sea, arched and green, the tallest of the lot, applauded our prudence. All the same, our professional pride was wounded. To stay at anchor is one thing: to weigh and stand for the attempt and then run home again 'hard up,' as a sailor would say, is quite another. There was a Greek mariner, the other day, put on his trial with one or two comrades for murder and mutiny on the high seas. They had disapproved of their captain's altering the helm, and had pitched him incontinently overboard. On being asked what he had to say in his defence, the prisoner merely cast up his hands and sobbed, "Oh, cursed hour in which we put about!" We recalled this simple but apposite story.

Having seen to our anchor and helped to snug down the mainsail, I went below in the very worst of tempers, to find the cabin floor littered with the contents of a writing-case and a box of mixed biscuits, which had broken loose in company. As I stooped to collect the _debris_, this appeal (type-written) caught my eye:--

"Dear Sir,--Our paper is contemplating a Symposium of literary and eminent men--"

(Observe the distinction.)

"--On the subject of 'What is your favourite Modern Lyric?' I need not say how much interest would attach to the opinion of one who," etc.

I put my head up the companion and addressed a friend who was lacing tight the cover of the mainsail viciously, with the help of his teeth.

"Look here, X," I said. "What is your favourite Modern Lyric?"

"That one," he answered (still with the lace between his teeth), "which begins--

"'Curse the people, blast the people, d.a.m.n the lower orders!'"

X as a rule calls himself a Liberal-Conservative: but a certain acerbity of temper may be forgiven in a man who has just a.s.sisted (against all his instincts) in an act of poltroonery. He explained, too, that it was a genuine, if loosely remembered, quotation from Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer. "Yet in circ.u.mstances of peril," he went on, "and in moments of depression, you cannot think what sustenance I have derived from those lines."

"Then you had best send them up," said I, "to the _Daily Post_.

It is conducting a Symposium."

"If two wrongs do not make a right," he answered tartly, "even less will an a.s.sembly of deadly dry persons make something to drink."

That evening, in the cabin, we held a symposium on our own account and in the proper sense of the term, while the rain drummed on the deck and the sky-lights.

X said, "The greatest poem written on love during these fifty years--and we agree to accept love as the highest theme of lyrical poetry--is George Meredith's _Love in the Valley_. I say this and decline to argue about it."

"Nor am I disposed to argue about it," I answered, "for York Powell--peace to his soul for a great man gone--held that same belief. In his rooms in Christ Church, one night while _The Oxford Book of Verse_ was preparing and I had come to him, as everyone came, for counsel. . . . I take it, though, that we are not searching for the absolute best but for our own prime favourite. You remember what Swinburne says somewhere of Hugo's _Gastibelza_:--

"'Gastibelza, l'homme a la carabine, Chantait ainsi: Quelqu'un a-t-il connu Dona Sabine?

Quelqu'un d'ici?

Dansez, chantez, villageois! la nuit gagne Le mont Falou-- Le vent qui vient a travers la montagne Me rendra fou!'

"'The song of songs which is Hugo's,' he calls it; and goes on to ask how often one has chanted or shouted or otherwise declaimed it to himself, on horseback at full gallop or when swimming at his best as a boy in holiday time; and how often the matchless music, ardour, pathos of it have not reduced his own ambition to a sort of rapturous and adoring despair--yes, and requickened his old delight in it with a new delight in the sense that he will always have this to rejoice in, to adore, and to recognise as something beyond the reach of man. Well, that is the sense in which our poem should be our favourite poem. Now, for my part, there's a page or so of Browning's _Saul_--"

"What do you say to Meredith's _Phoebus with Admetus?_" interrupted X.

I looked up at him quickly, almost shamefacedly. "Now, how on earth did you guess--"

X laid down his pipe, stared up at the sky-light, and quoted, almost under his breath:--