People who are commonly civil are not, as a rule, enjoined to show civility, and it is therefore fair to assume that there had been disturbances, and sweet bells jangled, before this old notice was set up.
LI
All Saints’ Street is the most picturesque in the old town. Its houses are for the most part ancient, and rarely are two alike. Many are gabled, some lean heavily forward or against their neighbours, others have latticed casements and great heavy timber frames; few are those that are not sketchable, and in between them goes the long narrow street, deep down below the raised pavements, towards the sea. The most picturesque of these ancient tenements, and perhaps also the oldest, is certainly the most famous, for it was the home of the aged mother of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel at the time when his squadron came cruising off the Sussex coast. We are told how, coming off Hastings, the Admiral, saying he had business ashore, was rowed to the Stade. Walking up All Saints’ Street, to the house pictured here, a humble old woman came forth, and he kissed her, called her “Mother,” and asked her blessing.
If improving frenzy will permit, the old house, already well on into its fifth century, is sound enough to last centuries more; and when modern iron and steel have rusted, or become brittle, its stout oaken timbering will be as sturdy as ever.
Between All Saints’ Street and High Street formerly ran the Bourne stream to the sea. Its course is now marked by Bourne Street, running, narrow and steep, to the shore.
And there is the sea. Not something outside the picture, as it seems to the road-farer who, tracing the road to Brighton, comes at last to the Aquarium, and finds the beach and the sea, as it were, “side-shows,” but an intimate part of the place—great waves slapping down vigorously upon a narrow shore, and, when the stormy winds do blow, spouting in great clouds of spray overhead, bringing with them tons of shingle or taking away many cubic yards of Parade and sea-wall.
No one could ever entertain the remotest doubt of Hastings being, in the most intimate sense, the seaside. The roadway of the front, especially the front of the Old Town, is so narrow, and the groyne-protected beach in general of such meagre proportions that, to be housed on the front, is to enjoy every sea-salty benefit of an ocean voyage, without its accompanying miseries of sickness. But the situation is not without its own peculiar drawbacks. Just as some great vessel, ploughing through heaving billows, will, in sailor language, “ship it green,” so do the more exposed houses take full measure when waves run high, cataracts flowing down basement steps and converting coal-cellars into impromptu marine tanks.
The elements at Hastings are at odds with the Board of Trade, which has forbidden the Corporation to take beach from the foreshore. Winds, waves, and currents deposit shingle in the roadway, and it has then to be cleared up; and, since the Government Department cannot require it to be replaced, it is sold. According to the town accounts for 1904, the Town Council in that year made £24 out of 120 tons of beach washed up in this way.
The sea in this Old Town corner of Hastings is undoubtedly the “ever fresh, the ever free” of the poet: the rolling ocean, the heaving billow, and everything adjectival in the marine sort. It is unquestionably that which you fail in many places of the Eastbourne type quite to realise: the home of little sprats and great whales; the cruising-ground of fisher-boats, steamships, and navies, no less than of the Albertine, the New Albertine, and the Favourite sailing-yachts, on which you get very seasick for the ridiculous sum of a shilling an hour.
The sea is that which your point of view makes it: home of the guardian fleets; a course upon which steamships earn dividends for their owners; the grave of thousands of drowned sailors; or fishing-ground for trawlers and seiners.
For what were you created? Answer, wild waves! For the delight of the midsummer child, with spade and bucket, and clothes tucked up; to enable the railway companies to run excursions to the “resorts” risen by the edge of you? What, on balance, are you: blessing or curse? You render our shores inviolate, but your sundering straits and oceans perpetuate Babel and maintain conflicting nationalities.
Were it not for you and St. George’s Channel there would be no Ireland, and consequently no Home Rule Question. For that, at any rate, we owe you a grudge—and must, since we cannot yet shift to fill that Channel up—continue to owe it.
This is the Stade, where the fisher-town exists, sufficient to itself, self-contained, and quite as apart in feeling, manners and customs, from the modern town and St. Leonards as though it were sundered by gulfs and distances, instead of just adjoining. Not a gulf, in fact, but something in the way of a mountain—the West Hill—intervenes, and only by the narrow line of George Street, Pelham Place, and Castle Street is ready communication open. It is sufficiently ready, but new town and old have different ideals in life, and agree to mingle over that thoroughfare threshold only when business calls. In the unconventional streets of the Old Town you lounge in the sunshine at open windows, or squat in unconcerned deshabille on doorsteps, gossiping across the width of the road; in modern Hastings the streets are of a greater width, but the manners are more strait, and you do not gaze forth from windows or exchange scandal with the house opposite.
The grandest view of Hastings is that of the Old Town from hard by the modern, but picturesque, Lifeboat House, whence you see the great East Hill looming magnificently up above the huddled houses that, whether they be of old red brick or tarred wood, are all, in the mass, artistically “right.” It is, in the summer, a crowded quarter, for the excursionists who feel a little abashed by the stucco magnificences and primnesses of newer Hastings and St. Leonards, and cannot elsewhere come into close communion with the untamed sea, find here an ideal dumping-ground for babies and provision-baskets. Here, thanks to modern masonry groynes, a fine mass of beach is gradually accumulating, in heaped-up plenty.
But it is not a crowded beach and a sunny sky that give the artist his chance at this point. His opportunity comes at those times when most folk would choose to be under shelter; when the rainbow arches in the leaden sky, the domestic washing of the Old Town flaps wetly in the squalls, and the distant tackle-boxes and the bell-turret of the Fishermen’s Church stand out almost in the blackness of silhouettes. Then the East Hill looks all its size, and more.
Unhappily, brutal things have been done in modern times to East Hill and West, in the cutting of shafts through the chalk for lifts; and the scar thus made in the face of the East Hill is, from many points, atrociously prominent; while day-trippers have even been known to mistake the embattled lift-station on the sky-line up there for the Castle.
LII
But sketchable at every turn is the Stade: the very reverse of St. Leonards, whose formal houses and formal people no one would choose to sketch or interest one’s self in. Here is the “Dolphin” inn, the “House for sea-wonders,” with an amazing fish from some distant clime hanging, very goggle-eyed and finny, and very dry, by the door; and, no doubt, stranger sights within. Beside it are “Tamarisk Steps.” Who is there would not, for sheer love of their names, explore Tamarisk Steps and Tackleway, that goes inland, parallel with All Saints’ Street, to the back of All Saints’ itself?
The “tackle-boxes” on the beach at Rock-a-Nore are a peculiar feature of the fisherman’s quarter. They are tall, tower-like, black-tarred wooden sheds of four or five storeys’ height, built in rows at right-angles to the sea, and identified by letters of the alphabet. In them are stored the nets and miscellaneous gear of the smacks. Generally groups of depressed, guernseyed, weather-beaten smacksmen may be seen and spoken with while mending their tackle, and are as unlike the fishermen and longshore folk of the comic artists as well may be. They are not so phenomenally broad in the “starn,” so pot-bellied, nor so patchy; and, instead of having that little dense patch of spade-beard, like the chin-beards of Rameses and other typical Egyptian statues, as inseparable from the conventional fisherman as a nimbus from the head of a saint, they are either very full-whiskered or quite clean-shaven. But the conventional fisherman will no more become obsolete than the conventional burglar with his ankle-jacks, his fur cap, and his furtive glance; or the conventional John Bull. There is nothing like them on earth, but they are necessary abstractions for the feeding of unimaginative minds.
You may read in the guide-books how the term “Chop-back” will rouse a Hastings fisherman to fury, and timid, yet inquiring people, approach the subject with them apologetically; but I declare they turn a puzzled look upon you, and seem hardly to comprehend the meaning of what is supposed to be a very offensive name—“Hastings Chop-backs,” deriving from the supposed descent of the Hastingers from those Norse rovers whose terrible axes cleaved their enemies down the back from skull to chine. Traditions of this undoubted antiquity are deserving of all respect, and probably the Hastings fisherfolk are descendants of those fierce rovers, but they are the mildest vikings it is possible to conceive, and would no more think of chopping any one down the back than they would dream of refusing a drink, even though the Blue Ribbonites of the Mission Church are active among them.
“Fishin’ ain’t wot it wur” is the general verdict; neither for “hur’n”—that is to say, “herring”—in the fore-part of the year, nor for mackerel in the after; yet the fish-market on the Stade seems busier than ever in the mornings, and over a thousand people subsist upon the proceeds of the harvest of the sea. But the fisherman is forced to cruise greater distances than before, the Channel being fished out and clean-swept by trawlers. Indeed, to listen to the doleful talk of a Hastings fisherman, one might think that not a single sprat or mackerel swam the English Channel between the North Foreland and the Lizard.
Those who explore this corner of old Hastings will acquire odd pieces of information from the fisherfolk. Rock-a-Nore, it will be found from them, and from one’s own personal experience, is the coldest place in the town; and, although they are not responsive to “Chop-backs,” they tell you that “Bourne” (i.e. Eastbourne) men are “Winnicks.” They look with disapproval on the new harbour-works; and are, indeed, true Conservatives, for they instinctively think any change to be inevitably for the worse.
Were I a fisherman I should, at any rate, resent the inference of the Mission Church planted on the beach, in their midst, as though an outpost of Christianity among the heathen. And such a mildewed, blue-mouldy, repellent building! But perhaps the situation, at the remote end—the cul-de-sac—of the beach, suggested the idea of paganism, piracy, and all sorts of unchristian things, at Rock-a-Nore; but if it be true that Labore est orare, then the fishermen are on more certain ground than many of the prayerful people who missionise them.
This is indeed, geographically, a dead-end, under the grey-white cliffs of East Hill; and being so, the Hastings Corporation have planted here those undesirable things—a mortuary and a dust-shoot. Next door to the mortuary you see the grim, unconscious humour of a warehousing firm’s announcement, “Tapner and Co. for Removals,” and at the end of all things, where a gigantic stone and concrete groyne projects into the sea, there is the town dust-destructor. Beyond is the perilous beach to Ecclesbourne, where the toppling cliffs above and the treacherous tide below often offer the unwary the unwelcome choice of being crushed or drowned.
LIII
On the way from Old Town to New, passing a flagrant music-hall and the hideous stucco semicircle of Pelham Crescent, you perceive, up aloft, on the craggy cliff’s edge, the ragged ruins of the old Norman Castle of Hastings, whose grey and mouldering walls are craggy as those chalk cliffs themselves. It is a long, a circuitous, and an arduous climb to the eyrie where that battered stronghold is perched, and although superior persons scorn and abuse the lift that brings you swiftly and without toil to that height, the elderly and the unduly fleshy, Hamlet-like persons among them, “fat and scant of breath,” take advantage of it, and archæologise easefully by the aid of modern mechanism. But little remains to arouse enthusiasm or to employ the pencil of the artist, and that which might have been, from its situation, as imposing as the Castle of Dover itself, is but the matter of a few speculative arches and grizzled masonry.
Ever since the historic period, and doubtless long before the era of recorded things began, there existed a castle, or a fortified post, on this lofty cliff-top, where the shattered ruins of Hastings Castle still stand, few and almost formless—the long superannuated warden of the town that has grown so great and has now absolutely no defences against the foreign foe.
When the Normans came, they found defences of some nature here, and hastened from their landing-place at Pevensey to seize and to more strongly fortify them, as scenes in that graphic record, the Bayeux Tapestry, show. The wooden walls, palisades, and outworks thus hastily constructed by the Conqueror’s men were speedily discarded for a permanent building of stone, and the grim hold thus erected was given into the custody of the Norman Counts d’Eu; who, jointly with the Abbots of Fécamp, were responsible for keeping open the sea-passage between England and Normandy. This duty was laid upon those secular and ecclesiastical personages in consideration of the rights granted to the Count d’Eu in the Castle and the Old Town, and the lordship over the “New Burgh” bestowed upon the Abbot of Fécamp.
Time has worked odd changes with Hastings and very thoroughly obscured the ancient names, so that what was then the “old town” has been so long and so utterly swept away and built over that its very existence at any former time is unknown to all save Dryasdust and his brethren. The old original “old town” stood, in fact, where the new town of Hastings stands to-day, and the Old Town of the present time is the “New Burgh” referred to in Domesday Book as the property of the Abbot of Fécamp. Dryasdust, who is a very estimable person and a learned, will tell you all you want to know about it—and much more; but he is always so fully informed, and diverges so abundantly and promiscuously into notes, parentheses, sub-heads, and innumerable asides of that kind that he presently lands you in topographical swamps and mazes, and, feeding you overfull of knowledge, gives you a severe literary and antiquarian indigestion.
In short, to make a plain story of it, where modern Hastings stands, practically level with the water, there spread, at the time when the Battle of Hastings was fought, a quiet inlet of the sea. This was the haven, the natural harbour of refuge against winds and waves, that originally caused the site of Hastings to be selected for a port. It would never have been chosen and settled had it been without shelter, as it is now; and Hastings of to-day is merely an artificial growth, like Brighton, Eastbourne, and many another seaside town, sprung up to serve a century or more of holiday-making by the sea. The town, as we see it to-day, would have been impossible had the place depended merely upon fishing and shipping; for on this stark-naked foreshore, swept by gales and raging seas, there is no shelter for vessels.
It was, in fact, the early silting up of this haven that led to the utter obliteration of the original old town dependent upon it. When the tide no longer flowed up to its ancient quays and wharves, their use, of course, vanished, and they eventually disappeared. In those long-departed days the Castle cliffs and a long reef of rocks extended a considerable distance out to sea, and formed the natural protection for this inlet; but in the course of centuries the sea made such inroads that the protection at last disappeared, and the shingle, in its easterly march, instead of being kept out in the Channel and on its course, found entrance, and steadily, and by no means slowly, cut off the haven from the outer waters.
Thus was the chief port of the famous Cinque Ports finally ruined by the then irresistible forces of nature. Already, in 1205, it had suffered political ruin; for, as the chief port in the intercourse between England and Normandy, its trade became extinct on the severance of the Dukedom of Normandy and the Kingdom of England, in the reign of King John. Five years before even that event the port was far gone to decay, for it could furnish but six of the twenty-one ships that in its prime formed its contribution to the nation’s defence.
Apparently the inhabitants of the Hastings that bordered this haven early realised its inevitable doom; and those of the neighbouring New Burgh—the Old Town of our time—did not shift for themselves, to form a harbour, until the reign of Queen Elizabeth. And even then they were reduced to “sending round the hat” for contributions and donations from more prosperous places. Pity the sorrows of a poor old port!
They were led to this course by the destruction of their old wooden pier; but it was not until seventeen years had passed that sufficient funds had been accumulated and a beginning was made in the spring of 1595. Even so, fate dealt hardly with the place; for although the new pier was built “all of huge rocks, artificially pyled, edge-long, one close by another,” so that it was considered highly permanent, it needed only the first storm of the following winter to overthrow it.
Something daunted by this mischance, but not beaten, the Hastings people built the pier anew, and of a different construction, with “tymbor braces and barres, crosse dogges, and suchlike up to the top: bowtyfull to behold,” and much else in that quaint way. Woe, woe! This much-admired work had not stood a year when, like the earlier, it was washed completely away. It happened on “All saints’ daie, 1597,” when “appeared the mighty force of God, who, with the finger of his hand, at one greate and exceeding high spring tyde, with a south-east wynd, overthrew this huge worke in lesse than an hower, to the greate terrour and abashment of all beholders.”
The inhabitants this time acknowledged defeat, and, recognising the futility of further endeavour, folded their hands and did—that easiest of things to accomplish—nothing. So, finally, ended the active existence of Hastings as a Cinque Port.
It is true that projects were from time to time raised, but they were never translated from words to deeds. At the beginning of the reign of Charles the First a very promising scheme was reported, by which a Dutch engineer, one Cranhalls, proposed to excavate and reopen the ancient haven at a cost of £220,000; but the beginning of that reign was also the beginning of trouble, and, as the condition of the country at the time was unfavourable for the prosecution of public works, nothing, again, was done.
Had it been possible to undertake those proposed works, Hastings at this time would be a vastly different place from what it is. You are to picture the scene—the bygone haven restored, and all that space now occupied by the very centre of the modern town—the Queen’s Hotel, the Albert Memorial, and Queen’s Road—a basin, with quays, wharves, and warehouses. The thing could be accomplished to-day, were it thinkable that the valuable house-property covering the site could be removed; but what might have been done with vacant land has long become impossible in a crowded town.
Yet, as the merest glance will show the casual visitor, the port and harbour idea is not dead. In these days of questing after the seemingly impossible—of eating your cake and having it too, of having things all ways and every way to your own advantage, an aim which worries individuals and corporations alike—it is not to be supposed that Hastings should be content with its present condition. If it were, it would be exceptional. But it is not. In the eyes of many who know Hastings well and love it much, it is well enough; but the town will never be content until it has acquired a harbour. It calls aloud for a harbour, just as the proverbial baby cries for the moon, but with this very important difference, that if it calls loud enough and long enough it will eventually get that harbour.
Time was, as we have seen, when it had such a haven, duly provided by Nature, and it now has, or had, a prospect of a newer, provided by private enterprise; not on or near the old site, but to be formed by building concrete piers out to sea from the East Hill and the fishermen’s quarters. One such arm has for some years been completed, but the works now appear to be finally abandoned, and all there is to show for the expenditure of the matter of a hundred thousand pounds is that long, unrelieved wall where the melancholy surges still sweep toward an unprotected shore.
LIV
Modern Hastings, like Brighton, dates its rise from the ultimate quarter of the eighteenth century, and its emergence from the status of a fisher town is due to the same prime cause: the discovery by the medical profession of fresh air and sea-bathing as specifics for that mysterious eighteenth-century malaise, “the vapours,” and all manner of other ailments. No royal favour, however, helped Hastings; only the recommendations of Dr. Baillie in the first instance, and secondly the fine brisk air of the place itself. Indeed, the climate of Hastings is a matter of as great concern to the town as her looks to a woman: it is her chief asset. You may read strange things of the Hastings climate, and indeed of that of any seaside town whose business is to attract visitors; and you will find, as a matter of curiosity, that Hastings claims not one climate, but several, according to height and position. Like the artful sinner who tried to get the best of both this world and the next, Hastings wants it both ways, and would have you believe it has actually got it, too. Thus, with a reminiscent shiver at the thought of the winds we have faced elsewhere, we read appreciatively of how the town is “screened from the biting blasts of the north and east winds,” and open to the “healthful and uncontaminated vapours” from the south and west, is saved from “the unwelcome calms which envelop some holiday resorts.” This, I take it, is one in the eye for Bath, for example, where in summer the visitor is stewed as effectively as any prune, or for Torquay, whose “gridiron” even St. Lawrence might on occasion find uncomfortably warm; while I think, on the other count, the withers of Brighton and of Weymouth—among other places where the east wind is capable of freezing your very marrow—are severely wrung.
In short, Hastings, by her own showing, is one of those favoured (not to say miraculous) places each of which has the better climate than any other, where the sun shines just so long and so brilliantly as you please, where the winds are never rude and the air never stagnant, and there are four hundred fine days (at the very least of it) to the three hundred and sixty-five of every year.
When Hastings really did begin to rise it grew quickly, and speedily overspread, not merely the old-time site, but brought into existence the twin town of St. Leonards as well. Theodore Hook was as it seems to us—strangely enthusiastic on the subject of those never-ending terraces, squares, and streets of stucco, new in his day. Says he: “Under the superintendence of Mr. Burton, a desert has become a thickly peopled town. Buildings of an extensive nature and elegant character rear their heads”—he meant, in plainer English, that they had been built, only perhaps a phrase without those eloquent frills would not have been “literature” as then understood—“where but a few years since the barren cliffs presented their chalky fronts to the storm and wave; and rippling streams and hanging groves adorn the valley which twenty years since was a sterile and shrubless ravine.”
Something is decidedly wrong in that description. The “extensive”—might he not equally well have said the “expensive”(?)—buildings and the “thickly peopled town” we allow, but those “hanging groves” and “rippling streams” are just the delightful objects the coming of the octopus streets abolished, and Hook sacrificed truth to a showy antithetical outburst.
I do not think Hook was sincere. I hope he was not, for surely one would sooner forgive literary insincerity than such a perverse taste. Lamb, who wrote of Hastings in 1823, we know was sincerity itself when he said he loved town or country; “but,” he says, “if this detestable Cinque Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrusting out their starved foliage from between the horrid fissures of dusty, innutritious rocks, which the amateur calls ‘verdure to the edge of the sea.’ I require woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, and inland murmurs.”
He, at any rate, saw nothing of Theodore Hook’s “rippling streams and hanging groves.”
“There is,” continues Lamb, “no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place of fugitive resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea-mews and stockbrokers, Amphitrites of the town, and misses that coquet with the ocean, if it were what it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to have remained, a fair honest fishing-town, and no more, it were something—with a few straggling fishermen’s huts scattered about, artless as its cliffs, and with their materials filched from them, it were something.”
True; but all that is merely a memory. Something of that vanished Hastings may be recalled by those who discover the Brassey Institute in the centre of the town, and climb to where the collection of local prints and paintings is housed; and something more of it may be seen, still in being, by those others who prowl inquisitively in rear of High Street, and there discover the old parish church of St. Clement, fellow to All Saints. It stands in a tightly wedged corner, on rising ground, surrounded by houses and puzzling alleys, and looks very reverend. It is, in fact, over five hundred years old. An ancient cannon-ball wedged into the western face of its tower is a relic of one or other of the several hostile appearances off the town that were not uncommon in the old days; but whether it be the evidence of Dutch good marksmanship in the seventeenth century, or of French gunnery in in the early eighteenth, there is no evidence to show. The corresponding ball on the other side of the belfry window is by no means a miraculous follow-on shot, but is an instance of the eminently British passion for the pendant, for things to match and balance. Just as the average householder must needs have a vase or a statuette on either side of the clock on the dining-room or drawing-room mantelpiece, or else feel uncomfortably one-sided, so the burgesses of Hastings were uneasy until they had duplicated the insult some passing privateer had put upon their town; and so one of these warlike objects is a sham.
LV
I am told that Hastings discourages the “tripper,” and that no longer do cheap day-tickets for weekdays or Sundays prevail. He is discouraged because he brings his nose-bag with him, because his children grow fretful and annoy the select, and because he brings no trade into the town and is off again by nightfall. Thus, paradoxically, he is required not to come because he goes so soon. But perhaps the delays and the peculiar methods of the railways serve more certainly to discourage that variety of holiday-maker. However that may be, no one can deny the “popular” character of the holiday-making in August, which is not the select season at Hastings.
Sunday cheap trips to Hastings were early and for long a feature, and eventually roused the wrath of the Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association. We need not here go into the rights and wrongs of Sunday tripping; but should any one discover a little book called “The Story of our Sunday Trip to Hastings,” published on behalf of that excellent body, let him read it, and find therein a fund of unconscious humour. The whole and sole intent and purpose of the book is to show, not merely how sinful it is to take a cheap Sunday trip by railway—and especially, it would appear, to Hastings—but how inevitably uncomfortable and even disastrous it will be. It is a tale of how, one August, a decent working man and his wife and little girl, and an assortment of friends, tripped one Sunday to this seaside. They started betimes—arising at four o’clock in the morning—probably with some foreboding sense that if you want to journey anywhere by South Eastern Railway it is well to get up in advance of the early bird, if not even to start the day before. They drove to Charing Cross in a cab, and it was already very warm. The cabman, indeed, “used a strong expression” to enforce his opinion that they would find it very hot. I think we all know the poetical phrase that cabman made use of.
Of course, the object being to paint this trip in very strong colours, mischances early began; but the party need not have been quite such fools as they are described. Passing over the inevitable dispute with the cabman, we follow them on to the platform, where they saw a porter slip and nearly get killed, whereupon “a sickening horror came over them at the thought of the scene they might have witnessed.” As for that, if you are to speculate upon the grisly “might be,” the blood-boltered “if,” the catastrophic “may happen,” why then there is no peace of mind for you at all, week-day or Sunday.
Friends who were to have been met on the platform were all but missed, and when found insisted upon quarrelling with strangers and quizzing other members of the party, until at length the train “ceased to move, and we were at our journey’s end.” It did not just “stop,” as ordinarily it does.
See now our party at Hastings. The day was blazing hot, and no shelter was to be found. The glare off the sea seared their eyes, and they took refuge in the streets, with the bitter reflection that they need not have left their home in happy Islington to see pavements and closed shops. Dinner was suggested, and they resorted to a dining-room, rich in the mingled odours of sage and onions and tobacco-smoke, where they dined off what purported to be gosling, but was really an old and half-starved fowl. If the dishes were lukewarm, the room, on the other hand, was blazing hot. “Mr. Peters,” one of the party, called for “malt liquor”—could it by any chance have been “beer”?—and saw that somebody else paid for it; and, this princely and elegant meal over, the party dispersed in various directions.
Then the brilliant idea occurred to one who claimed to know Hastings that a breeze and shady trees would be found in the Castle gardens, on the cliff-top. They climbed that “terrible” road, only to find that the gardens were closed on Sundays, and that, even had they been open, no trees and no shade existed there. Finding at last some stunted, insufficient trees, they rested awhile, descending only to give the girl a chance of fainting in the heat.
And so the weary day dragged on until it was time to return home. They all assembled at the railway-station, much to the reader’s surprise. Why had not some of them taken a boat and been drowned, or been eaten by a sea-serpent? Why had they not even missed the train? We shall learn.
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day,” says the poet; but disasters seem inevitably to wait upon those who “trip, trip, trip it” to the sea on Sunday; especially if they dine upon emaciated fowl sinfully masquerading as a young goose.
No appalling disaster happened to the swift South Eastern train. It did not, strange to say, break down, and still less did it come into collision with another. Nor even were train-wreckers prowling along the line, to place obstructions upon the metals and so bring the sinful to an appropriately ghastly end. No: nothing of that kind happened; but when two-thirds of the journey had been accomplished a thunderstorm broke. “Never mind, we’ll soon be at home,” said Martha. “Alas! it seemed as if home grew more distant than nearer.”
But at last London was reached and an omnibus with difficulty found. On the way, however, a horse, overworked with Sunday labour, fell dead, and the journey had to be miserably finished in the rain. What, by the way, would have been made to happen to a motor-omnibus? That could not fall dead.
The party reached home at last, but Martha fell ill, and eventually died of consumption. “Never,” declares the supposed narrator of this elegant piece of fiction, “shall I forget our Sunday Trip to Hastings.”
I should think not, indeed!
Let us therefore go to Hastings by road: and be sure it is not on a Sunday.
A SLAIN NORMAN.
Bayeux Tapestry.