Delphi complete works of.., p.1287
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells, page 1287
Probably these handsome houses were not meant for the lodgings that they have now so largely if not mostly become. It is said that the polite resident population has receded before the summer-folk who have come in and more and more possessed the place, and to whom the tradesman class has survived to minister. At any rate it is the fate of Folkestone to grow morally and civically more and more like Atlantic City, which somehow persists in offering itself in its wild, wooden ugliness for a contrast as well as a parallel of the English watering-place. Nothing could be more unlike the Leas than the Board Walk; nothing more unlike their picturesque declivity than the flat sands on which the vast hotels and toy cottages of the New Jersey summer-resort are built; nothing more unlike the mild, many-steamered, many-schoonered expanse of the Channel, than the immeasurable, empty horizon, and the long, huge wash of the ocean. Yet, I say, there is a solidarity of gay intent and of like devotion to brief alien pleasures in which I find the two places inseparable in my mind.
If such a thing were possible, I should like to take the promenaders on the Leas whom I saw in April, 1904, and interchange them with the same number of those whom I saw two months before on the Board Walk fighting their way against the northeasterly gale that washed the frozen foam far in under it against the frozen sand. Yes, I should be satisfied if I could only transpose the placid, respectable Bath-chairmen of the Leas, and the joyous darkys who pushed the wheeled wicker-chairs of the Board Walk, and turned first one cheek and then another to the blast, or took it in their shining teeth, as they planted their wide, flat feet, wrapped in carpet, with a rhythmical recklessness on the plank. I should like, if this could be done, to ask the first, “Isn’t this something like Folkestone?” and the last, “Isn’t this like Atlantic City?”
Perhaps it is only the sea that is alike in both, and the centipedal steel piers that bestride it in either. The sea makes the exile at home everywhere, for it washes his native shore and the alien coast with the same tides, and only to-day the moss cast up on the shore at Dover breathed the odor that blows in the face of the stroller on Lynn Beach, or the Long Sands at York, Maine.
We were going by a corner of it to see the landing of the passengers from the Calais boat, and to gloat upon what the misery of their passage had left of them; but before we could reach the deck they had found shelter in their special train for London. It used to be one of the chief amusements of the visitors at Folkestone to witness such disheveled debarkations at their own piers, and we had promised ourselves the daily excitement of the spectacle; but the arrival of the boats had been changed so as to coincide with our lunch hour, and we pretended that it would have been indelicate to indulge ourselves with it when really it was merely inconvenient.
There are entertainments of an inoffensive vaudeville sort in the pavilion on the pier, and yet milder attractions in the hall of the Leas Pavilion, which for some abstruse reason is sunk some ten or twelve feet below the surrounding level. The tea was yet milder than the other attractions: than the fair vocalist; than the prestidigitator who made a dozen different kinds of hats out of a square piece of cloth, and personated their historical wearers in them; than the cinematograph; than the lady orchestra which so often played pieces “By Desire” that the programme was almost composed of them. A diversion in the direction of ice-cream was not lavishly fortunate: the ice-cream was a sort of sweetened and extract-flavored snow which was hardly colder than the air outside.
At Folkestone we were early warned against the air of the sea-level, which we would find extremely relaxing, whereas that of the Leas, fifty feet above was extremely bracing. We were not able always to note the difference, but at times we found the air even on the Leas extremely relaxing when the wind was in a certain quarter. Once, in a long, warm rain, I found myself so relaxed in the street back of the Leas, that but for the seasonable support of a garden wall against which I rested, I do not know how I should have found strength to get home. You constantly hear, in England, of the relaxing and bracing effects of places that are so little separated by distance, that you wonder at the variance of their hygienic qualities. But once master the notion and you will be able to detect differences so subtle and so constant that from bench to bench on the Leas at Folkestone you will be sensible of being extremely relaxed and extremely braced, though the benches are not twenty rods apart. The great thing is to forget these differences, and to remember only that the birds are singing, and the sun shining equally for all the benches.
The sun is, of course, the soft English sun, which seems nowise akin to our flaming American star, but is quite probably the centre of the same solar system. The birds are in the wilding shrubs and trees which clothe the front of the cliffs, and in the gardened spaces on the relaxing levels, spreading below to the sands of the sea; and they are in the gardens of the placid, handsome houses which stand detached behind their hedges of thorn or laurel. This is their habit through the whole town, which is superficially vast, and everywhere agreeably and often prettily built. It is overbuilt, in fact, and well towards a thousand houses lie empty, and most of those which are occupied are devoted to lodgings and boarding-houses, while hotels, large and little, abound. There are no manufactures, and except in the season and the preparatory season, there is no work. Folkestone has become very fashionable, but it is no longer the resort of the conservative or the aristocratic, or even the aesthetic. These turn to other air and other conditions, where they may step out-of-doors, or wander informally about the fields or over the sands. A great number of smaller places, more lately opened, along the everywhere beautiful English shore, supply simplicity at a far lower rate than you can buy formality in Folkestone.
But the birds say nothing of all this, especially in the first days of your arrival, when it is only a question whether you shall buy the most beautiful house on the Leas, or whether you shall buy the whole town. Afterwards, your heart is gone to Folkestone, and you do not mind whether you have made a good investment or not. By this time though the Earl of Radnor still owns the earth, you own the sky and sea, for which you pay him no ground rent. Of your sky perhaps the less said the better, but of your sea you could not brag too loudly. Sometimes the sun looks askance at it from the curtains of cloud which he likes to keep drawn, especially when it is out of season, and sometimes the rainy Hyades vex its dimness, but at all times its tender and lovely coloring seems its own, and not a hue lent it from the smiling or frowning welkin. I am speaking of its amiable moods, it has a muddiness all its own, also, when the Hyades have kept at it too long. But on a seasonably pleasant day, such as rather prevails at Folkestone, in or out of season, I do not know a much more agreeable thing than to sit on a bench under the edge of the Leas, and tacitly direct the movements of the fishermen whose sails light up the water wherever it is not darkened by the smokes of those steamers I have spoken of. About noon they begin to make inshore, towards the piers which form the harbor, and then if you will leave your bench, and walk down the long, sloping road from the Leas into the quaint, old seafaring quarter of the town, you can see the fishermen auctioning off their several catches.
Their craft, as they round the end of the breakwater, and come dropping into the wharves, are not as graceful as they looked at sea. In fact, the American eye, trained to the trimmer lines of one shipping in every kind, sees them lumpish and loggish, with bows that can scarcely know themselves from sterns, and with stumpy masts and shapeless sails. But the fishermen themselves are very fine: fair and dark men, but mostly fair, of stalwart build, with sou’westers sloping over powerful shoulders, and the red of their English complexions showing through their professional tan. With the toe of his huge thigh-boot one of them tenderly touches the edge of the wharf, as the boatload of fish swerves up to it, and then steps ashore to hold it fast, while the others empty a squirming and flapping heap on the stones. The heaps are gathered into baskets, and carried to the simple sheds of the market, where the beheading and disembowelling of fish is forever going on, and there being dumped down on the stones again, they are cried off by one of the crew that caught them. I say cried because I suppose that is the technical phrase, but it is too violent. The voice of the auctioneer is slow and low, and his manner diffident and embarrassed; he practises none of the arts of his secondary trade; he does nothing, by joke or brag, to work up the inaudible bidders to flights of speculative frenzy; after a pause, which seems no silenter than the rest of the transaction, he ceases to repeat the bids, and his fish, in the measure of a bushel or so, have gone for a matter of three shillings. A few tourists, mostly women, of course, form the uninterested audience. A few push-cart dealers were there with their vehicles the day of my visit. Some boys were trying to get into mischief and to compromise some innocent, confiding dogs as their accomplices. One vast fish-woman, in a man’s hat, with enormous hips and huge flanks, moved ponderously about, making jokes at the affair, and shaking with bulky laughter.
The affair was so far from having the interest promised, that I turned from it towards the neighboring streets of humble old-fashioned houses, and wondered in which of them it would have been that forty-three years before a very home-sick, very young American, going out to be a consul in Italy, stopped one particularly black midnight and had a rasher of bacon. It seemed to me that I was personally interested in this incident, as if I had been personally a party to it, and it was recalled for my amusement, how a little old man, in a water-side fur cap of the Dickens type, came to the front-door of that humble house, and, by the dim light of the candle he bore, recognized the two companions of the young American, who had made friends with them on the journey from London, where they dwelt, and where they had left all their aspirates except a few which they misplaced. I think they must have been commercial travellers going to Paris upon some business occasion, and used to the transit of the Channel, which was much more dependent then than it is now, in its beginnings and endings, on the state of the tide, so that it was no surprise either for them or for that old man to meet at midnight on his threshold in a negotiation for supper. He set about getting it with what always calls itself, in no very intimate relation to the fact, cheerful alacrity, and at a rather smoky fire in the parlor grate he set the tea-kettle singing, and burned the toast, and broiled the bacon, which he then put sizzling before his guests, famished, but gay and glad of heart. Even the heavy heart of the very homesick, very young American was lifted by the simple cheer; and it seemed to him that while there might have been and doubtless would be better bacon, there actually was none half so good in the world. He had no distinct recollection of the Channel crossing afterwards, and so it must have been good, and he could recall little of the journey to Paris or the sojourn there. Being as proud as he was poor, he travelled second-class incognito, but some sense of an official quality must have transpired from his mysterious reticence, for at Paris when they were taking different trains from the same station, one of those good fellows came to his car-window to shake hands. It was in that dark hour of the civil war when the feeling between England and America was not the affection of these halcyon days, but the good fellow put it in the form of a kindly gibe. “I say,” he mocked, holding the American’s hand, “don’t make it too ‘ot to ‘old Us, down there?” Then he waved his hand and disappeared, smiling out of that darkness of time and space which has swallowed up so many smiling faces.
That darkness had swallowed up the humble Folkestone house, so that it could not be specifically found, but there were plenty of other quaint, antiquated houses, of which one had one’s choice, clinging to the edge of the sea, and the foot of the steep which swells away towards Dover into misty heights of very agreeable grandeur. In the narrow street that climbs into the upper and newer town, there are curiosity shops of a fatal fascination for such as love old silver, which is indeed so abundant in the old curiosity shops of England everywhere as to leave the impression that all the silver presently in use is fire-new. There are other fascinating shops of a more practical sort in that street, which has a cart-track so narrow that scarce the boldest Bath chair could venture it. When it opens at top into the new wide streets you find yourself in the midst of a shopping region of which Folkestone is justly proud, and which is said to suggest to “the finer female sense,” both London and Paris. Perhaps it only suggests a difference from both; but at any rate it is very bright and pleasant, especially when it is not raining; and there are not only French and English modistes but Italian confectioners; one sees many Italian names, and their owners seem rather fond of Folkestone, of which they may mistake the air for that of the Riviera. I wish they would not guard so carefully from the people at the Leas Pavilion the secret of the meridional ice-cream.
This street of shops (which abounds in circulating libraries) soon ceases in a street of the self-respectful houses of the local type, and from the midst of these rises the bulk of the Pleasure Gardens Theatre, to which I addicted myself with my love of the drama without even the small reciprocity which I experience from it at home. In the season, the Pleasure Gardens adjacent are given up to many sorts of gayety, but during our stay there was no merriment madder than the hilarity of a croquet tournament; this, I will own, I had not the heart to go and pay sixpence to see.
But at no season does Folkestone cease to be charming, if not in itself, then out of itself. A line of omnibusses as well as a line of public automobiles runs to the delightful old village of Hythe, which is mainly a single street of low houses, with larger ones, old mansions and new villas on the modest heights back of its sea-level, where the sea is first of all skirted by a horse-car track. The cars of this pass the ruins of certain old martello towers between the sea and the long canal dug at the beginning of the last century as part of the defences against the Napoleonic invasion, apparently in the hope that such of the French as escaped the dangers of the Channel would fall into the canal and be drowned. But the chief object of interest at Hythe, beside the human interest, is the ancient church. It is of the usual mixture of Norman and Gothic characteristic of old English churches, but it has the peculiar merit of a collection of six hundred skulls, which with some cords of the relative bones wellnigh fill the whole crypt. These sad evidences of our common mortality are not æsthetically ordered, as in the Church of the Capuchins at Rome, but are simply corded up and ranged on shelves. The surliest of vergers ventures no fable such as you would be very willing to pay for, and you are left to account for them as you can, by battle, by plague, by the slow accumulation of the dead in unremembered graves long robbed of their tenants. It is hard for you, in the presence of their peculiar detachment, to relate these smiling ground-plans of faces —
“Neither painted, glazed nor framed,” — to anything at any time like the life you know in yourself, or to suppose that there once passed in these hollow shells, even such poor thoughts as do not quite fill your own skull to bursting.
It is, nevertheless, rather a terrible little place, that crypt, and you come out gladly into the watery sunshine, and stray among the tombs, where you are not daunted by the wide bill-board conspicuously erected near the entrance with the charges of corporation, vicar and sexton for burial in that holy ground, lettered large upon the panel. That is the English outrightness, you say, that is the island honesty, and you try, rather vainly, to match it with a like publication in such a place at home which should do us equal credit. Other things were very like country graveyards at home, though not those strange, coffin shapes of stones which lie on so many graves in Kent, and keep the funeral fact so strongly before the living. But there were the grass-grown graves; the weather-beaten monuments, the wandering brambles, the ineffectual flowers. Besides, there was the ever present ivy, ever absent with us; and over the Gothic portal of the church was a grotesque, laughing mask, with open mouth, out of which a sparrow flew from her nest somewhere within the wrinkled cheeks. As if that were the signal for it the chimes began to ring in the square, gray church tower, and to fill the listening air with the sweetest, the tenderest tones. The bells of St. Leonard’s at Hythe are famous for their tenderness, their sweetness, and it was no uncommon pathos that flowed from their well-tuned throats, and melted our hearts within us. Doubtless at the same hour of every afternoon the forbidding verger returns to the crypt which he has been showing to people all day at threepence a head, and weeps for the hardness of his manner with emotional tourists. At any rate the bells have made their soft appeal to him every afternoon for the hundred and fifty-eight years since 1748, when a still older tower of the church fell down, and they were put up with the new one.
